


A River Flowing

by Barkour



Series: Peachy [2]
Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, POV Alternating, Pregnancy, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-14 21:38:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 52,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1279774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A shadow has left the force, but other threats remain as Padmé and Anakin prepare for the birth of their child.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Two Months.

**Author's Note:**

> This follows Pitfalls (first in the series), but sadly, it's much more serious than that fic. A River Flowing will be something of an experiment, as it will mark the first time I've attempted a WIP since 2010. Hopefully I'll succeed!
> 
> ARF will consist of six related 'stories,' with five shorter interludes spaced between. Updates will (again, hopefully) be twice monthly, one story, one interlude, until it's complete.
> 
> Thank you very much for your patience. :)

She woke fully in the dark, with the night still long and Anakin gone from their bed. She raised her hand; it hung in the air. Something had woken her. An ill-defined suggestion of intent slipped from her, and as it faded she wondered what it was she had wanted to do so powerfully that she’d come to as she had. Padmé touched her temple.

Anakin came in like a shadow through the door. His head was down, his hair a tangle of half-curls, and he was pulling a long black glove over the intricate metal work of his prosthetic hand. The Jedi had called him, then. Her hand fell to the bed, and the little rasp of her fingers brushing across the silk brought his eyes up.

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “I was coming to wake you up.”

She eased up against the headboard. The top sheet pooled in her lap. She’d worn a very light shift to bed, her shoulders bare and the chest cut low across her breasts, as it was a hot night even for Coruscant. Now her skin pricked. A chill took her. A sort of thin ache started at the backs of her eyes.

“You didn’t want to just steal away in the night?” she tried to tease. “Out the window and off the balcony, like a secret lover would.” She pressed her cheek to her shoulder, looking out as she did so at the city, how it shone through all hours.

He crossed the vast, empty spaces of the bedroom. His heels sounded hard on the stone. She knew, even before he reached her, what he would do; it was the certainty of a dream. With the other glove stuffed in his flight jacket’s pocket, Anakin sat on the edge of the bed, at her feet. Her toes curled beneath the sheet. He offered her his hands, the gloved hand and the whole hand, and she took them. The leather was very smooth, but his bare fingers were callused at slight angles. He held the lightsaber more often than he held her hand.

“It’s a simple escort mission,” he told her. “I shouldn’t be away for more than a week.”

Padmé cocked her head to the side and smiled lightly. “I’m not a child, Annie. This isn’t the first time you’ve gone away.”

His fingers tightened around her hands. In a moment, he would kiss the back of her hands, first the right and then the left; and then he would stand and leave. She saw him doing this, like through a clear sleeve, even as he held her hands and looked down at her knuckles.

Before he could bend to her, Padmé leaned forward and kissed his cheek, where the scar that divided his eye ended. He started. She didn’t catch him off-guard terribly often. He’d lines under his eyes, faint bruises. Once, he’d told her Jedi didn’t have nightmares, but she’d felt him shuddering as he slept; she’d heard his breath catch. Jedi or not, the war had come home with him.

“It will be over soon,” she said. “You felt it. Don’t you remember?”

Easier to believe the war was drawing to a close in the dark and quiet hours of night, their heads together and their hands clutched between them.

“Yes,” said Anakin. He looked at her, as if he were trying to see it in her eyes, the certainty they’d both felt the week before when he’d reached out for her in his sleep. Slowly, he said again, “Yes. The war is almost done,” and she made herself believe it, so he would believe it when he saw it in her face. She wanted to believe many things. Most of all, Padmé supposed, she wanted to believe that the distance that had grown between them over the last year could be crossed as easily as he’d walked from the door to the bed to sit beside her. If it could be crossed, she would have to walk too.

“I’m proud of you,” Padmé said.

Anakin ducked his head. He was laughing, the corners of his eyes creasing. Padmé smiled at his dark head and lifted her hand out of his grip to brush the hair back from his eyes.

“Every day,” she said to him as he looked up to her again, “I am—so proud. I think, Anakin is very brave and he is very strong, and so many people throughout the galaxy look up to him as a hero, and I think, he’ll be coming home soon. He’ll be coming home to me very soon.”

The hand he still grasped, he grasped so her fingers ached. Then he let her go. Her hand fell to the sheet. His jaw worked.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been here,” he said.

“You have a duty to the Republic,” said Padmé, “just as I have a duty to it. We have our responsibilities and we must take care of them.” She caught his jaw with her fingertips. “Anakin—”

“Sometimes,” he said lowly, “I don’t care about duty at all. Out there, I—” His hand had found her knee. He clutched at her through the sheet. His eyes, when he lifted his gaze to her, were shadowed; the lights of the city were at his back. 

“There’s so little worth saving,” he said. “Do you know, out there, I see all the ways the Republic is failing, the way the Jedi are failing—”

“That doesn’t mean they aren’t worth saving,” Padmé countered. She cupped his face in her hands; she made him look at her. “Just because something has been broken doesn’t mean you can’t fix it. Do you remember, on Tatooine—” 

He tensed, and she knew he thought of that night in the desert when he’d found Shmi dying in the sand while Padmé waited at the Lars’ homestead and felt, for perhaps the first time in her life, thoroughly useless and unsure of what to do.

“That podracer,” she said firmly, and the muscle in his cheek began to relax, “that we helped you build. There wasn’t much time before the race and we only had a little money for parts, but you won with that racer.”

A smile flickered at his mouth, there and gone and then, quietly, there again.

“I remember,” Anakin said. He brushed his finger across her chin. “I remember you laughed at me when I said it would work.”

“I never laughed at you,” she protested. “I thought you were very brave—”

He shook his head, but he was still smiling, lopsided now as he smiled when he laughed at her. “You didn’t think I could do it,” he said. “You thought it was horrible, letting a little boy in a podracer, and for money.”

“Well, you did win,” she said, “even if it was horrible. And I did believe in you—I do believe in you—”

“You were frightened,” he declared. “You thought I was going to crash into a cliff, and then you’d all be stuck on Tatooine.” Tatooine, he said; he always said it as if he’d rather dive into a lake of fire than set foot on Tatooine again. He’d the right to that.

She traced the swell of his cheek with her thumb. His eyelashes dropped.

“I’m fighting this war too,” she said. “And I’m always on your side, even when we disagree. Just like you’re always on my side. You’ll come home again, and I’ll be here. And whatever’s broken, we can fix it together.”

His hand stroked up her leg. The sweep of his long fingers along her thigh was a promise she intended to hold him to. 

“I’m sorry I’ll miss your speech.”

She half-laughed, only an exasperated breath she let out. “I’m sure they’ll play it over and over again all week,” she said, “along with a thousand other tributes, until everyone’s sick of hearing about it.”

Not kindly, she thought perhaps with Palpatine dead, Anakin would move away from the more fascist ideologies the late chancellor had encouraged in him. But she knew too that Anakin had truly respected Palpatine, and she had herself once known him as a kindly statesman from Naboo who had offered her advice when she was still very young and new to the throne; so this she buried deep.

Very earnestly Anakin said, “I could never be sick of hearing your voice.”

Padmé kissed him, there in the dark of their lonely bedroom, and she was smiling as she did so. Everything would be all right, she thought again. She clung to that. Anakin sighed against her; his hands rose to frame her shoulders; he pressed into the kiss, and she drew him to her, her fingers in his hair. They parted. His eyes were closed. The scar bisecting his eyebrow and gouged into his eyelids—she kissed that again, chastely.

“I love you,” Anakin said. His voice was rough. His teeth flashed. “More than anything else—sometimes, when I think there’s nothing out there worth saving—”

She wouldn’t let him say it. Padmé caught his mouth and gave softly of her own, so whatever was rising in him would be at ease again.

“When you come home,” she said when she settled back, “I’ll be here.”

He touched her face fleetingly one last time, the padded leather nearly obscuring the sudden corners of his prosthetic fingers.

“I will come back,” he said.

He was a shadow in shadows. The city glimmered, uncaring. How many denizens on every level of the great and endless city? None of them knew that right now, Anakin Skywalker’s fingers slipped from her cheek, and all Amidala wanted for one awful, selfish moment was to take his hand and set it on her jaw again.

“I know you will,” said Padmé.

*

The message from Ahsoka arrived shortly before the state funeral for the Palpatine. Plainly, Ahsoka wrote that she wanted to see Padmé, if the senator wasn’t too busy. That was all. Half-dressed and at odds with a very poorly timed bout of morning sickness, Padmé managed as little: she suggested a time in the afternoon for the day after next, at her residence. She thought Ahsoka had likely had enough of grave meetings at imposing offices.

The funeral was an involved affair. Palpatine had been loved truly, and in his death it seemed as though all his faults had died, too. As Senator Organa, leader of the opposing party and thus, according to the galactic senate’s organization, vice-chair beneath Palpatine, spoke of loss in the time of war, Padmé—rather, Senator Amidala—sat on the stage, from which Palpatine had orated, behind the great, black casket now dedicated to him. The casket was empty, as Palpatine’s body had been returned to Naboo for a proper water burial. It was winter in Theed now, and the palatial canals would be rimmed with the faintest hint of frost. Padmé stared past the casket and tried not to vomit. 

The herbal supplement she’d taken had done little to settle her stomach. So difficult to believe at first, the pregnancy had certainly dismissed any lingering doubts she’d carried about with her. Soon, she thought, she would have to schedule an appointment with an obstetrician, someone disinterested in either gossip or money. Padmé had few enemies, but scandals didn’t require enemies. A pounding had started in her head, at odds with the roiling of her gut. She wished she could remember how long Sola’s morning sickness had lasted; she couldn’t think of how to ask now, with her sister’s youngest child nearly eight.

Her name caught her attention. She looked up from the nothing she was considering.

“Senator Padmé Amidala,” Bail had said. He gestured to her, his palm up.

She rose with all the grace of long practice and walked around that bare casket to the speaker’s podium. It was cool in the senate’s ampitheatre, the ventilated air here far cleaner than that of the Coruscanti open. Yet a sudden heat tiptoed up her back, and a sensation of being unmoored gripped her. In her turn, Padmé gripped the lectern tightly and hoped her hesitation would be taken as grief for a beloved leader of their shared people. Senator Jar Jar Binks had been invited to sit on the stage as well, in full recognition of Naboo, but she knew Palpatine had never considered any Gungan to be his concern. He had argued very slickly against allowing for Gungan representation of Naboo, as, he’d said, they’d so little involvement in the planet’s political sphere.

Senator Binks sat quietly behind the casket. His hands were folded. He did not mourn.

Looking out across the hundreds of thousands of persons crowded into all the many stories of the enormous theatre, Padmé wanted to wipe from the tablet the speech she’d written so very carefully and shout out, “The death of Palpatine can only mean the rebirth of the Republic, and the restoration to the people of power he would have taken for himself.” It was as if she had stepped into the shadow of a dala’st, the hateful ghosts said to lurk in the mountain caves that stood watching over wintry Theed.

Coruscant waited for her. Anakin would be watching, she thought, or listening to it where he could. Whatever she said now would be played at regular intervals throughout the news cycle; he could hardly miss it. Another secret, then, that she had to keep for the moment. How lucky, that she would not begin to show for another month, two if she were truly fortunate. Anakin had said as much last night, before he’d received the call, his hands spanning her naked belly.

She had turned her gaze down to the lectern. Bail, ever solicitous, rested a hand on her shoulder, like a man lending his strength. She thought his show of sorrow was as false as her own. When had she become such a cynic?

Only a moment had passed, surely enough to grant a peer struck by the loss of a beloved mentor. Padmé lifted her face. She’d no real need for the tablet anyway. She’d memorized the speech, as she memorized all her speeches, a little touch of honesty that had not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. And if I am nothing, Padmé thought, I am honest.

“People of the Republic,” said Senator Amidala, “divided now by war, a great tragedy has united us once more today.”

*

Padmé fixed a pot of shizi tea in the hour before she expected Ahsoka. The tea, along with the other herbs she’d uncovered in the very back of the cupboards over the refrigerator, had been a last minute gift from her mother on her last trip to Naboo, a year ago. If Anakin had been home, he would have hopped onto the counter and found everything. Padmé had to fetch a ladder from the closet.

“I really don’t think you ought to be doing this in your condition,” C3PO fretted. 

Half-on top of the refrigerator, she’d looked back at C3PO. “My condition?” she asked. “Am I ill?”

“Your fecundity,” he whispered before resuming his usual plaintive tenor. “What if you were to fall? What of the baby? I implore you, come down, Mistress Senator. You must think of the baby’s well-being.”

“The baby will survive me looking into a cupboard.” Padmé hitched her knee on the side of the refrigerator and started rooting in the cupboard. “I’m not as delicate as everyone seems to think I am, Threepio.”

“I must beg to differ,” he said, affronted. “You are quite small, and very human. Why, if anything were to happen to you while I’m here—I just don’t know what I’d do.”

“Oh, Threepio,” said Padmé. She leaned out of the cupboard and smiled down at him from the top of the fridge. “You’d call the emergency services line and correct the medical droids when they got here and fuss over me the entire time, and you’d be entirely happy.”

“I could never be happy if you were hurt, Mistress Senator,” said Threepio. “Please, allow me—” Stiffly he reached for the ladder.

He was a dear, but oh, how he fretted. In a strange sort of way, it was like having her mother with her. 

“No, I’m all right! Besides,” Padmé said, “I don’t think you’d like it up here. It’s all dusty, and is that—” She brushed at a cobweb and said, “Oh, it’s just a spider.”

“My word!” He recoiled entirely. “I shall have to speak with the cleaning droids. That is most unacceptable.”

Padmé crawled deeper into the cupboards.

“Please do, C3PO. They’re sure to listen to you. Would you speak with them now?”

“It’s disgraceful!” he said. “How barbaric! Spiders in the cupboards! I’ll straighten this out right away. In the cupboards!” he was muttering as he left to harangue the suite’s attached droids for an hour. Two, if she knew C3PO.

“Thank you, C3PO!” she called after him. Hitching her sleeves up, Padmé began dragging old tins and forgotten goods out of the recesses. 

When she did at last find the package at the back, wrapped in plain paper and tied with a blue ribbon, she slipped the ribbon over her hand and carried it carefully. Halfway down the ladder, the room flipped onto its side, and Padmé clung to the ladder. Her head pounded. Desert heat closed around her, so ferociously she thought she would throw up and then C3PO would never let her leave her room ever again. But the wave of vertigo faded as quickly as it came upon her, and after a moment Padmé could take the last two steps to the floor and then, gratefully, the four steps to the table by the wide box window that stretched up into a skylight. She could rest then, but she’d set out for something, and she wouldn’t lay her head down on the table and doze there in the sunlight when she had what she’d looked for.

As she unwrapped each of the tidy bundles one by one, hunting for the distinctive serrated edging of the shizi leaves amidst all that paper, Padmé realized she hadn’t spoken with her mother in nearly a month. She went incrementally still, there in the airy kitchen. The late morning light snuck in through the skylight, though the sun’s movement would soon lead it behind an opposing skyscraper. A shadow would glide in through the sheet of transparisteel then, and she would have to move to the sitting room to enjoy the sun.

Her mother had insisted Padmé take the packets of herbs with her. Dawn had just swept up the mountain; it stained the kitchen of Padmé’s childhood with the cooler reds of a Naboo morning.

“They’re from your father’s garden—”

“You don’t have to bother. I’m fine, and you know they always double-check how much weight you carry on with you, down to the microgram—”

“Yes,” Jobal said, “but you can’t get any of these on Coruscant, I know you can’t, I asked your father to check and he said—”

“Why would I ever need shizi tea?” Padmé had laughed. The leaves were famously known to help with stomach ache, but everyone knew—everyone on Naboo, at least—that really, shizi was for morning sickness.

Jobal folded the paper neatly around the herb and said, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what you get up to out there. Maybe you’ll meet someone nice.” Her mother turned to look for the tape and then straightened. “Oh! I saw that Anakin of yours on the holo the other day. He was so nice—he looks so ferocious now. Is he all right?”

Padmé leaned against the counter, her arm flush with her mother’s arm, their shoulders together and their elbows too. Jobal pricked her thumb on the dispenser’s razor and, swearing, brought her thumb up to suck at it.

“I don’t speak to him anymore,” Padmé said.

Her mother frowned. “Oh, but I liked him.”

“He was only watching me because it was his job to do so. And anyway,” Padmé said lightly, taking her mother’s hand, “Jedi aren’t allowed to have relationships like what you’re thinking.” She found a little plaster in the drawer, where Jobal always kept the plaster in the kitchen.

“And how do you know that?”

“Everyone knows that,” said Padmé, as she bent to clean her mother’s thumb. “I don’t have the time for a relationship as it is. Not with all the work to do in the senate, and the war going on.”

When she’d finished, Padmé kissed her mother’s hand and laughed, but the lines around Jobal’s eyes only deepened. She rested her hand on Padmé’s cheek, like she’d done when Padmé was very young and had a fever.

“I do worry about you,” said Jobal softly. “All alone and so far away.”

Padmé covered her mother’s hand, her fingertips light on her mother’s bony wrist. A knot showed in her mother’s brow. The dawn had crept all the way up the island in the center of the kitchen and was now making its way up the far wall, illuminating the faded mural of fishermen they’d never gotten around to painting over. The confession was chewing at the bottom of Padmé’s tongue.

“I’m not alone,” Padmé said, “I have all of you calling me when I’m supposed to be working.” Teasingly she said, “Worry about Anakin instead.”

Her mother had swatted her, and that had been the end of it. On the ground-to-orbit shuttle, Padmé had watched Theed recede into the greater continent and the continent into a splotch in the connected sea. If she had told her mother, Anakin and I are thinking of children, what would Jobal have said? The herbs had sat at the bottom of one of her bags, and when she’d got back to her suites she’d put the bundle in the cupboards over the refrigerator, and now here she was staring at her hands while her stomach roiled. C3PO would be back soon, and Ahsoka was on her way. Padmé got up and requested the hot water she’d need for tea.

She was nursing a second cup in the sitting room when the bell sounded. C3PO broke off his lecture concerning the efficacy of a number of hardy and evidently distasteful herbs native to Tatooine to answer the door. The cup had cooled in her hands. Padmé looked up.

“Threepio.”

He paused at the threshold. “Yes?”

Briefly, she touched her flat belly. “Discretion,” she said only. 

C3PO drew his straight back up even straighter and said, “Always, Mistress Senator,” and then he had gone.

Padmé considered the cup of tea she held. The cup was a deep bell, in the southern Naboo tradition; the aesthetic was one not of bell but bubbles, rising to the surface from somewhere dark in the ocean. Shizi leaves made for a thin tea with little color, and if she tipped the cup so light caught inside it, the tea showed very faintly blue against the rich, patterned green of the glazed glass, patterned so the glaze looked like the way light played on sand beneath the water as waves rolled on. The cups had been a gift from her parents when she’d been elected princess of Theed. As the prospect of a child settled on her, she found ghosts of her family all around her.

C3PO’s chatter preceded him. Padmé drained the rest of the tea and then set the cup aside on its saucer, shaped like a flower with petals curling up so as to hold the cup securely. The sitting room, she realized, was decorated in the Coruscanti fashion. At one time she must have thought that necessary. A neutral choice, to reflect the metropolitan nature of Coruscant, rather than to make explicit homage to Naboo where she would greet guests: a political choice, and one that suddenly sat oddly in her chest. She had not been homesick in a very long time.

C3PO stood a moment in the doorway. “The lady Ahsoka,” he said, with only the very slightest of hesitations before he called her lady. He stepped into the room, making space for Ahsoka, who lingered in the doorway. She’d grown; her montrals were thicker, and she stood an inch or so taller than she had when Padmé last saw her those five months ago. Ahsoka had worn plain brown clothes then and boots that ran up to her knees. Now she was in green, bright green, and her toes curled against sandals. Padmé smiled at her.

“Thank you, C3PO,” Padmé said. “Would you mind getting Ahsoka a glass of—” Water, that was what Ahsoka usually had.

Still hanging back with her hands stuffed in her jacket pockets, Ahsoka finished for Padmé. “Fizzy juice. Please.” She’d her chin tucked down; she peered out from between her striped tails.

“Certainly,” said C3PO. “We have many flavors to suit the tastes of most everyone, although, Mistress Senator, I do believe the dispenser may have a virus as it has been very rude lately—”

“Taitai juice is fine,” Ahsoka said, and C3PO, cut off, started.

Quickly, Padmé said, “I’ll call the company tonight and see if they can’t find out what’s wrong with it. Will you leave me a note on the datapd on my desk so I’ll remember to do that?”

“Of course,” said C3PO, turning from Ahsoka. “And may I say, it is so refreshing to have my insights respected. Everything would just go to shambles around here if it weren’t for me. I can’t begin to imagine what your schedule would look like…” His voice floated back to them as he made his way to the kitchen.

“I forgot how much he talked,” said Ahsoka.

“Well, he’s an enormous help,” Padmé said. “And he is right; nothing would run half so well without him. Please, sit. You don’t have to stand there all day.” She gestured to the long, wraparound sofa that took up so much of the sitting room. 

Ahsoka perched on the end opposite Padmé so that the circular table was between them. She sat very lightly, and just before she did sit, she paused and looked across the room, for what Padmé couldn’t imagine. Ahsoka’s lips pursed and then smoothed. Her hands stayed in her pockets. The jacket had a sequined collar and her flowing trousers sported stripes in alternating red, orange, and blue; the effect was garish. After a moment, Ahsoka took her hands out of her pockets and set them on her knees.

“Thanks for making the time to see me.”

“I’m just happy to hear from you,” Padmé said. “I haven’t seen you in so long. Look how much you’ve grown! Sorry—” She covered her mouth. “I sounded so much like my mother.”

At last, Ahsoka smiled. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s nice. But I know I called you really suddenly, and you didn’t have to see me so soon. So thank you.” Her fingers tightened on her knees and then eased. “What I really wanted to thank you for was, um, defending me in the trial. I left so quickly that I guess I forgot to say thanks.”

C3PO came in with the fizzy juice and the pot of tea for Padmé; he left again. Ahsoka didn’t touch the juice. 

Gently, and with care, Padmé said, “That was very hard for you, all of it. You don’t have to worry that I’ve held it against you. After something like that, anyone would have wanted to go as far away as they could as fast as they could.”

“It still wasn’t right,” Ahsoka said. Her chin came up. “I should have thanked you. Especially when everyone else had decided I was guilty, but you kept fighting for me.”

“Master Skywalker didn’t think you were guilty,” said Padmé. “He believed in you very much, just like I did.” 

It was a particular high beam she had learned to cross very well, very steadily, with her hands at her side so no one would ever suspect she walked it; to speak of Anakin as she would a friend, not even a terribly close friend though someone she respected, when the truth was that the day Ahsoka had left the order, Anakin had told Padmé he was afraid that everything he had sought to achieve in his life with the Jedi was worthless, that he had failed Ahsoka.

“Have you spoken with him yet?” Padmé asked, knowing already.

“No,” said Ahsoka. “I don’t—regret leaving the Jedi.” She said this harshly, as though she expected a reprimand; but Padmé only waited. Ahsoka looked searchingly at Padmé. “I don’t regret it. I had to leave. They didn’t trust me—no one trusted me—and I knew that they didn’t—” Her jaw hardened. She was just a child, still. Her voice rose. “They teach you acceptance, to seek harmony and knowledge in the force, but I couldn’t accept that. I can’t accept that. They asked me to come back to the order but they weren’t sorry—they wanted me to just, to accept it. To accept that they didn’t trust me, that they thought I would set a bomb off to kill innocent people, and—”

Her fingers were digging into her knees. Ahsoka’s gaze dropped to the tall glass of fizzy juice. The bubbles popped, drifting up from the bottom of the glass.

“He isn’t ashamed of you,” Padmé said. 

Ahsoka looked up to Padmé. Her eyes—very large, very blue—fixed. The table between them was very wide; Padmé could not rest her hand on Ahsoka’s hand. Instead, she went on.

“Anakin isn’t ashamed of you,” Padmé said again, firmly. “We spoke once about that day, and he told me what you said to him, that he’s unhappy with the order as well. He understands why you left, and I feel that—I believe that he is proud of you. He has never stopped being proud of you.”

Two months ago, Padmé had found in her jewelry box a little braided bracelet Ahsoka had made for her the year before out of leudu silk and clay beads. She’d laughed and slipped it on her wrist and worn it all day, and Anakin, spotting it, had asked her where she’d got it. She told him, thinking perhaps he would smile, but instead his eyes had darkened; he’d looked away. She’d thought then, too, of Sola: how when her sister, fourteen years old and furious with it, had run off with a boyfriend for a week, their parents had been silent and worried. Once, they had argued late at night, as Padmé listened from the corridor, sitting at the top of the stairs and waiting for her older sister to come home. 

Anakin had reached for Padmé’s hand and touched the bracelet Ahsoka had given her and said, “I’m worried for her. She never speaks to me. I don’t know where she is or how she’s doing, Padmé.”

“You have to be patient,” Padmé told him. “She’s very young, and she’s just had to give up everything she’s ever known. She’s probably out there trying to find herself.”

“What if she’s in danger?” Anakin demanded. “What if she’s in trouble and I’m not there to get her out of it?”

Like her father had said of Sola to Jobal, then Padmé had said, “You have to trust Ahsoka.”

Now Ahsoka sat across the table from Padmé, Ahsoka with her knees together and her hands clutching her knees so fiercely and all her joints still so knobby. She’d grown, Padmé thought again; but she was so young. Older than Padmé had been when she had been queen, but young, a child, and she’d been alone for months, out there without anyone to protect her or at least listen to her. But that was a parent’s fear, that their child could not survive without them, and here Ahsoka was, taller than she’d been before, her horns growing, surviving.

“I’ve never stopped being proud of you,” Padmé said.

Ahsoka’s eyelashes flickered; the corner of her mouth flicked too. When she smiled, she did so shyly. How often had anyone told Ahsoka they were proud of her?

“Thank you,” Ahsoka said, and Padmé had swallowed through the swelling in her throat.

“Drink your juice before it goes float,” she scolded Ahsoka, and she reached for her own tea. “And I want you to tell me everything you’ve been up to since I last saw you. You’re so much taller now!”

“No, I’m not,” Ahsoka protested. “I don’t think I’m ever going to get any taller. I’m just going to be short forever. Everyone’s going to call me snips until I’m dead.”

Padmé ran her finger around her cup. “Well, I thought I wouldn’t grow anymore for years but when I was sixteen I found I’d added another inch. So there’s always hope.”

“But you’re tiny!” said Ahsoka, laughing. As soon as it was out, her shoulders snapped in tight; her eyes rounded—a strange, funny, sweet thing to see from a girl Anakin had so often characterized as reckless and impolite, never seeming to recognize his own person in this, though Padmé had happily teased him for it many times.

“I’m sorry,” Ahsoka said, “senator—”

“No, it’s all right,” Padmé said. “I’ve accepted it. And,” she said on the impulse, “you can call me Padmé.”

That got her another smile, brighter now. The tension in Ahsoka’s shoulders eased, and in slow, slight, unconscious increments she began once again to sit up straight before Padmé. She wished that Ahsoka had sat beside her, so that she could rest her hand on the girl’s slim arm, and the distance between them would not seem so great. Ahsoka, again, glanced across the room. Perhaps she’d heard C3PO puttering around in the kitchen.

“So what have you been doing?”

Ahsoka shrugged. “Not a lot.”

“That can’t be true. From what I remember, you’re always doing something.”

Ahsoka rolled the glass between her hands. The bubbles in her drink shivered. “I traveled a little,” she admitted. “There was a group of rogue Jedi that Master—” She stumbled a moment. “—Skywalker and I worked with a while ago. I thought that maybe they could help. Altis—he left the Jedi, too.”

Quiet, then.

“Did it help?” Padmé asked.

“I don’t know,” Ahsoka said. “The Jedi who follow Altis, they disagree with the council’s teachings. But I’m not sure that I do. It’s what the council does, not what they teach.” She deflated a bit. “Sometimes. Some of the stuff they teach, I don’t think that’s right either. I’m not sure.” She looked down to her drink. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“It makes more sense than you think it does,” Padmé said. She picked her tea up and cradled the cup in her hand, a simple gesture that caught Ahsoka’s attention. “Politics is often like that. A person can say and do many great, wonderful things, but at the same time they can do and say just as many awful things. Sometimes you have to work with people you don’t very much like to do something worth doing. And sometimes a person you do like believes in ideas you disagree with fundamentally.”

Ahsoka’s fingers curled around the glass. “Like you and Master Skywalker,” she said.

Padmé paused, the tea cup at her lips.

“Yes,” she said. “Like us. We respect each other very much, but our political views are…”

“You think he’s wrong,” Ahsoka said.

Padmé took a sip and then, delicately, set the cup down in the matching saucer. 

“Yes,” she said. “I disagree with his belief that it is the right of those with power to govern the lives of those without power.”

She looked at Ahsoka, who was looking not at Padmé but at the bank of windows at Padmé’s back, the transparisteel sheets that opened out onto the wide balcony that stretched along the side of the suite. Padmé could not know precisely what Ahsoka thought or felt in the moment any more so than she could know what anyone else thought or felt at any time, but she hadn’t forgotten Sola or how Anakin had once said to her, “They don’t understand anymore, none of them do. I wish I could just leave,” and she had thought, Why don’t you? but held her tongue knowing it was for the same reason why she hadn’t left politics, even as Palpatine’s power grew.

“It’s hard, isn’t it,” said Padmé, “leaving something you loved. Leaving people you loved. And every now and then you think, I made a mistake when I left.”

“Did I?” Ahsoka asked.

“When I was elected to the senate, I asked my mother the same question,” Padmé said. “I was only twenty-two, and I’d been queen since I was fourteen. I’d spent all my life in politics, it seemed, and it was only when the results came in for the senate elections that I realized I’d just agreed to four more years of it. And even though I knew it was selfish of me, I kept thinking, Now I have to leave my family again. And my mother said, the only person who could tell me if I’d made a mistake was my self. I don’t think I did.”

Ahsoka looked down at her hands. The sun had moved on. Silently, the artificial lights grew in strength.

Softly, Padmé said, “Master Skywalker has told me that the Jedi teach letting go of regret. On Naboo, we say, the river keeps flowing. Once you’ve done something, you can’t take it back.” As Anakin had bent to kiss her, there at the lake on the day of their wedding, she had thought this. The river kept flowing. Now I cannot take it back, she thought as she rose on her toes to kiss him in turn. She had given herself to the course. The river would not stop. Wherever it would go now she would go with it.

As Padmé spoke, Ahsoka had lifted her head; she’d tipped it to the side, as if to hear her better. She’d begun to frown, just so. Padmé might as well try.

“You should speak with Anakin—”

Then Ahsoka shot up onto her feet. Padmé, startled, leaned back.

“What is it?”

“There’s someone else here,” Ahsoka said. She turned on her heel, first one way and then the other. “Is he here? Did you bring Master Skywalker here?”

The bottom fell out. Padmé felt suddenly, intensely ill. She kept no holos of them; every surface in the apartment was bare. Sparse, clean, professional: that was the aesthetic she had cultivated. No relics of their marriage existed but for the padawan braid she kept locked in a wooden box under the bed. She tried for calm, for polite confusion.

“Excuse me?”

Ahsoka hissed through her teeth. “There—it’s gone again—but I know he was here; I could sense him. It’s like—”

She cut short. She was—so briefly—very still, and then she rounded on Padmé. Ahsoka’s head-tails swung. Her lips had parted; her teeth, slightly edged, flashed. She stared at Padmé as if she had only just noticed her. Ahsoka’s gaze dropped, from Padmé’s face down to the as yet sleek plane of her belly. I am going to throw up, Padmé thought as Ahsoka’s eyes snapped back up to her. Any illusions Padmé might have allowed herself died; she could hardly mistake the comprehension in Ahsoka’s face.

So: it was done. You knew this was coming, she thought. Secrets had a way of outing. The sensation of nausea ebbed. Padmé was glad she’d set the cup down; it couldn’t betray her. She folded her hands together in her lap to hide the shaking. Pinprick certainty had replaced the overpowering impulse to lean over and be sick. She saw it all very clearly; she had spent so many hours considering the possibilities. Anakin would be expelled from the order. If Padmé were lucky, the distance of the next election from the breaking of the scandal might preserve her career; the senatorial elections were in two years. The preservation and unification of Naboo under her rule, that might protect her, and of course Anakin was a hero of the war. Before, he had been a hero to Naboo: the boy pilot who had saved the young queen. Surely they would survive this; surely they _could_ survive it.

She would have to tell her mother. The Jedi, she knew, would want to test the baby; Anakin was so very strong in the force. Master Jinn had been adamant that the boy be taken from Tatooine to Coruscant. She remembered it very well.

“C3PO,” Padmé said, as calmly as if she’d forgotten an umbrella on a rainy day, “could you please bring me some water?”

“I knew it,” said Ahsoka, breathlessly. She darted around the side of the sofa. “I knew it!”

“Excuse me?” Padmé said again. The house was falling apart all about her, and she could not think of how to stop it though she had meticulously planned out any number of contingencies. The truth was, she had hoped so profoundly that no one would ever realize that she had begun to believe it impossible that anyone should. No one knew. No one could know. 

Ahsoka will not tell, she thought; but Ahsoka had known.

“I knew it, but no one would have ever believed me,” Ahsoka said. She clambered onto the table and sat there, her knees folded up, just before Padmé. Her arms hung off her knees.“I knew he was in love with you, but I didn’t know if you loved him back. You’re a way better liar than Master Anakin is—”

Padmé managed, “How? How did you—” Her hands separated. She brushed her belly. The admission clutched her throat. 

Ahsoka blinked at her. She tipped her head very slightly; her long tails drooped. The darker, masking skin of her eyelids showed again, at odds with the paler tones of her cheeks. “I was with Altis and his students for a month,” she said, “and Altis lets his students marry and have families. Force babies have this sort of—this kind of—” She wiggled her fingers by her head. “Like an echo. But I didn’t think—not you.”

It was the “not you” that did it, the mingled awe and surprise. Padmé leaned forward and grasped Ahsoka’s hands; she clutched them so tightly her own fingers hurt. Ahsoka’s breath started, and Padmé eased her grip or tried to. 

“Please,” she said, “please, don’t—if they learn of it, Anakin—they’ll make him a master soon—” And her career—Naboo was so conservative; to wed a Jedi in secrecy— That fell out of her, too, awful and selfish, it had to be such a thing, but she could not return to the mountains of Naboo when she’d so much still to do, so much else she wanted to see through. Padmé’s hands fell away. Serenity washed over her again. 

Ahsoka turned her hands over and caught Padmé. Her fingers encircled Padmé’s wrists. All the weight of all the worlds was in Ahsoka’s hands. That was how it seemed to Padmé, as if she were untethered and floating into the sky and Ahsoka were a stone. Ahsoka’s hands were cool, her fingers very long. She lowered her eyes.

“I’m not a Jedi,” said Ahsoka. She said it in a worn voice. The Jedi hadn’t trusted Ahsoka, but Padmé, volunteering to represent her before the court, had; Anakin had trusted her.

“I’m sorry,” Padmé said, clutching Ahsoka, “I know you wouldn’t tell, I do—but it’s been so long—”

She would retain her composure, Padmé thought. The secret would have come out sooner or later. Ahsoka was only a girl; and Padmé collapsed against her. Ahsoka held her there. She was just a child. 

“How long?”

Padmé closed her eyes. She was trembling. 

“Before the war,” she said. “After Geonosis.”

“The entire time,” said Ahsoka. “And he never told me. I can’t believe he never told me. I was his padawan, and he never told me—”

“We didn’t tell anyone. We couldn’t. Our duties,” said Padmé, “before all else,” and she laughed, thinking of the two years of secrets and lies and here she was lying again, talking of duty as if she hadn’t forsaken hers the moment she told Anakin she would marry him. Did she make a mistake? The river keeps flowing, she thought. Ahsoka rubbed the bony nubs on the outsides of Padmé’s wrists with her thumbs. Was this how Jobal had felt when Padmé tended to her cut hand in the kitchen?

At the doorway, C3PO said, “Oh, dear! Mistress Senator! Are you all right?”

“She’s fine, Threep,” Ahsoka called to him. “Did you get the water? Bring it over here.” And as Padmé made to sit up—to push away and push down everything, lock it up again so she would not break, she would not—Ahsoka hugged her fiercely once and whispered, “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”

“Thank you,” said Padmé, and she squeezed Ahsoka’s hand; she clutched it; she let Ahsoka go. Now someone knows, Padmé thought; and it was relief that flooded her chest, not fear. Someone knew. She could breathe again. She did, as C3PO poured Padmé a glass of water and Ahsoka said, lightly as only a young person could, 

“I can’t believe you never told me. When I see Mister Skyguy again, I’m going to pop him on the nose.”

Padmé looked at her and she could say it now. She could. You don’t have to pretend as if you don’t know, she thought.

“He misses you, Ahsoka,” said Padmé.

“He’d better,” said Ahsoka, but she was smiling, not shyly at all but pleased like a child hearing she was loved.

“Here, Mistress Senator,” said C3PO. He pressed the cold glass into Padmé’s hand.

“Thank you, C3PO,” she said, and she found she too was smiling.

What a difference it makes, she thought, to know I’m not alone; and though she could not know what Ahsoka thought or felt, she suspected—she felt—she did know, somehow, as if she had always known, that Ahsoka thought the same. It wouldn’t hold. For the moment, it was enough.

Ahsoka said, “More fizzy juice. Please.”

*

The only persons with the authority to enter the apartment, without either an escort or being allowed in by someone already inside, were Anakin and Padmé. Naturally: she was a senator, after all. Already she had lived through two assassination attempts; security was paramount. So she’d no other expectations when the balcony doors opened. She was curled up on the sofa with a glass of juice and her datapad, having meant to reread the proposal to tighten regulation of the interstellar food trade. Instead, Padmé had begun to doze; dozing, she had slept.

The doors, opening, whispered against the stone floor. At first she thought it part of a dream; Anakin, too. He took the datapad from the table and sat down on the corner, near enough so his knee brushed her arm where it dangled off the sofa. It had to be a dream, she thought; he’d been called away and he wouldn’t be home again, not for long, lonely months. Perhaps that had been the dream. Anakin traced her jaw with a finger. The leather was warm from his skin and it smelled as leather did but also as Anakin did, drily and distantly sun-burnt.

She smiled up at him. His hair was a mess, a tangled sort of dark halo. He’d such fair hair once, but she liked it brown; she liked the little secret veins of gold that peeked out every now and then. She had been very near to sleep after all.

“Oh,” Padmé said, covering his hand on her cheek, “you’re home. Was I expecting you?” She couldn’t remember.

“You weren’t there,” he said. His hand slipped out from under her fingers. He meant to sweep the curls from her eyes, and he did so, his fingertips tickling her brow. “I looked for you all over the hangar. I would have been home sooner if I’d known you weren’t going to come.”

She yawned and stretched her arm up, up and then back over the arm of the sofa. She’d a knot in her neck and another at the small of her back, where she’d twisted so her legs were out flat, knees up, and her shoulders turned so she slept on her side. He’d the datapad in hand, rested on his thigh.

“You know I can’t always greet you. Someone will notice I’m there to see you, sooner or later, and then they’ll begin asking questions.”

“Let them try,” said Anakin darkly.

Sleep grimed her eyes; she rubbed the grit out as she struggled upright. “What time is it?”

“Late,” he said, shrugging. “You shouldn’t sleep out here. You’ll get cold and then you’ll get sick—”

“It isn’t cold in here.” She pinched the nearest of his knees, tugging at his trouser leg. “How did the mission go?”

“Well enough. Boring,” Anakin admitted. Then he smiled; it was the wolfish smile close to a smirk. “Though we did have some trouble near the rendezvous. I took care of that. If I’d someone useful with me, it would have gone a little more quickly.”

“If only you could have had more fun,” Padmé teased. “I’m sorry you didn’t have as much excitement as you would have liked.”

“I suppose you’ll have to make up for it,” he said, dipping low. 

His hands braced, one on the sofa’s arm and the other at her shoulder. She slid her hand up his loose, belled sleeve to clasp his elbow. His eyes had closed; she watched him. Kissing, once, had been such a furtive, hot thing. Now his fingers curled so when he stroked her arm, his bared nails slipped smoothly over her skin. Padmé knew his mouth very well; when the war was over she would know it better. She breathed across his lips and Anakin turned his head; his mouth opened to her; his unruly, dark hair brushed her throat. He’d so many old freckles around his eyes, and she was forever memorizing them. When the war was over, would they know how to live with one another? He’d worn his boots inside again. The stones could be cleaned easily, but she did want to lay down some textiles from Theed. The domesticity of the thought burst like a warm bubble in her chest. 

Padmé wrapped her arms around the back of his neck and pulled him toward her. He slid off the table and came to sit beside her, there on the very edge of the sofa; the hand at her arm dropped to her hip; he snuck that hand back behind her waist. The arrangement would not sustain, too precariously were they set, but she twisted her fingers in his hair and drew him down anyway so that his boot groaned as it ground along the stone floor. His eyelids flickered; she did not look away. Anakin engulfed her. He clutched her; he wound his arms around her; his breath stuttered while she kissed his lower lip, drawing it between her own lips. The gloved, artificial hand on her backside settled firmly. 

She let his mouth go, at last. Anakin chased after her. The mess of his hair blocked out nearly all the light; in the shadow he cast, only Padmé remained. He kissed her cheek, the side of her nose, the corner of her eye nearest to her nose and then the corner on the outside. The lights glimmered, peering now and then through his hair. She carded her fingers through the mess, and he drew in a hard breath when she pulled a knot out. 

“Let’s go,” he said. He caught her up in another kiss, and Padmé set her hand high on his chest. Her thumb fit to the notch in his clavicle; she pushed him back.

“Padmé—”

“We need to talk.” 

His jaw set, mulish; but he relented. His hands slipped from her. He leaned back, still just barely on the sofa.

“All right,” he said. “What about?” He touched her throat, one finger again, following the column. “Can’t it wait?”

“No,” Padmé told him. She drew away, so that she might sit up truly, her back to the sofa’s arm. The space so made between them was insubstantial. Even had they been in separate rooms, it would feel so. Hadn’t she only just thought how comfortable they were now? Seeking distance enough to marshal her thoughts proved that well wrong. There was a consumptive intensity to the way he ran his fingers over her shoulder, and though her skin pricked, she still could not say if it frightened her. 

“I saw Ahsoka,” she said. 

The petting stopped. He met her gaze. His hand, slowly, closed about her arm; then he drew his hand from her; he began, remotely, to close off, his expression blanking.

“You did?” His brow knotted. “When?”

“Two days ago,” Padmé told him. “She came to see me here.”

“She didn’t—” Anakin compressed his lips. His fingers flexed; he made fists and then relaxed and then made fists again. “She didn’t speak to me.”

Padmé took his hand. He let her, unwilling.

“She’s afraid you’re ashamed of her.”

“She—” He turned on Padmé. “How could she think that? She’s my padawan, I could never—”

“That,” said Padmé, “is what I told Ahsoka.” Gently she forced his fingers out flat so she could run hers up the length of his palm. “How many times have you complained about Obi-Wan to me?”

“That’s different. He’s—”

“Your master.”

“I’m a knight now. Obi-Wan is no longer my master.”

“And Ahsoka isn’t your padawan.”

Anakin looked away from her. The tendon in his wrist stood out sharply.

“I told her to call you,” said Padmé. “That you miss her, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t speak with each other.”

“She’s left the order,” he said to the far wall. “Any attachment I had to her—”

“Is a good thing.” Padmé clasped his wrist. “Anakin. Look at me. You’ve already made a decision that goes against the Jedi’s laws—”

“It isn’t really a law.” He did look at her then, sidelong with his eyelids nearly down. “It’s more of a—enforced guideline.”

Padmé sighed. “I don’t want to debate moral semantics. I just want you to know that she misses you as much as you miss her.”

Stubbornly, Anakin said, “She hasn’t called me. If she needed me—”

“You always wait for someone else to start something,” Padmé said, exasperated, “but don’t you see that for Ahsoka, it’s just as hard—”

“I don’t wait,” he said, “I don’t—you make it sound like I’m, like I’m indecisive—”

“She’s so much like you as it is—”

“And is that a bad thing? Is that wrong?”

“I’m not saying it is,” Padmé argued, “but if you find it difficult to reach out to her, then maybe it’s true that she has trouble reaching out to you.”

“She’s never had trouble before,” Anakin snapped. “She was always very clear with me about what she felt and wanted—”

“She’s a teenager, Anakin.”

“She’s a Jedi!” The muscles in his cheeks worked. His mouth screwed up and then flattened, but the tension around his nose lingered.

“She was a Jedi,” Padmé corrected him. “She isn’t now. You can’t expect her to know what to say to you when you’ve stayed with the order. She feels that the Jedi betrayed her.”

“I’m not the council. I didn’t betray her,” Anakin said, “I believed in her. I trusted her. I found her so that I could clear her name—”

“And then she left anyway,” said Padmé.

He stared at Padmé; fixedly, she knew, and with growing anger. She’d cut too deeply, too precisely. It was a skill politics had honed in her, to understand a person and to know how and where to push at them. Be kind, she thought. Be kind. Padmé ran her hand up his wrist and down again. 

“She didn’t leave because of you.”

“She didn’t stay for me either,” he said.

“I didn’t tell you this because I wanted to argue with you about it.”

“I’m not a child.” He took his hand from her. “Don’t talk down to me—”

“I’m not talking down to you!” Padmé said. “If you would just listen to me!”

“I am listening!”

“So stop arguing with me,” she snapped. “I don’t know why you _are_ arguing with me.”

Anakin rubbed at his closed eyes, thumb at the left and his fingers massaging the right. “I’m not arguing with you; I don’t want to argue with you. I just want to know why Ahsoka would go to you before she would come to speak with me.”

“Because you’re still a Jedi.”

“And what’s wrong with that?” he asked, accusatory. “That I’ve decided to stay with the order instead of leaving?”

“Nothing is wrong with it.” She cast about. “If you feel guilty—”

He was quick to cut her off at that. 

“I don’t feel guilty. This is my life. I’ve made the choices I wanted to make for myself.”

“But it isn’t Ahsoka’s life,” Padmé said, struggling with her own rising temper, “not anymore. She made a choice to leave the order, for herself, and now she’s worried that you don’t want to speak to her.”

Anakin rose off the sofa. “How could she think that? Why wouldn’t she trust me?” Pacing, he spun on his heel. His hair flared out; his jacket, unbuttoned, hung loosely around his chest.

“Maybe because she’s afraid you’d act like you are right now!” Padmé said, and Anakin laughed furiously. “She looks up to you, Anakin. She wants your approval. You’re like a—” She cast about; it wasn’t the right word for it, but she didn’t know how else to put it to him so he’d understand: “Anakin, you’re like a father to her. She’s afraid that you’ll be disappointed in her.”

He turned his face away. 

“She should trust me,” he said.

“You should trust her,” said Padmé. “Like you did before, when she _was_ your student. You have to trust her. You must. Anakin. Look at me. Please. Anakin,” Padmé said again as he finally, reluctantly, came back to her. “Anakin, she knows.”

He understood immediately. The change washed over him, as thoroughly as a storming ocean might knock a man off his feet. In Anakin it manifested as a widening of the eyes, a little slack in the jaw, a sudden and terrible stillness in his shoulders, his bearing; the set of his hips. He took a step toward Padmé, a single, abbreviated step. His heel clicked lightly on the stone. The remaining five steps of such a similar length he took in two strides and then Anakin was down on his knee beside the sofa, between Padmé’s knees; he was reaching up to cup her face.

Urgently he asked her, “What did you tell her?”

Padmé remained as she was beneath his hands: collected now, unmoving.

“Nothing, at first. She found it out on her own.”

“How?” Anakin’s hands fluttered; he could not stop touching her, first her face, then her arms, her belly once and fleetingly. “How did she find it out? We were careful—” That, too, he said as a question.

“She felt the baby,” Padmé said. She lowered her eyes. Dreamlike, she too touched the slope of her abdomen, where nothing lived and yet something was growing, as had happened so many times before and would again, a thing so immensely ordinary that nevertheless struck her as unbelievable. “It isn’t really even alive yet, but I suppose those things—” Padmé colored slightly; this was a Jedi’s consideration and not hers, and she’d never really bothered to learn the biological roots of the faith. Haltingly she said, “The… midichlorians. They’re there. Ahsoka sensed them, somehow. She thought it was you until. You’re the Jedi,” she half-joked, but it was weak.

Anakin settled his palm on Padmé’s gut; the heel of his hand covered her navel. He was fixated on that spot of contact now. Padmé strained and yet she could feel nothing; she sensed nothing, no more than the warmth of his hand through her dressing gown. It didn’t live, not yet, whatever the child would be; it was, now, in the early days of the second month, little more than an expanding bundle of nerves, twitching and forming small connections as a rudimentary brain developed.

“Already,” he said, and that was another question. His gaze rose; another.

“She won’t tell,” Padmé said. “Ahsoka promised me she would keep the secret. So you see, we have to trust her.”

His hand migrated up to the side of her breast; from there, to her arm.

“Ahsoka always keeps her word,” Anakin said slowly. “And it isn’t visible yet.”

Padmé thought to sweep the tangled hair back from his brow, to tuck it behind his ear if she could. She kept her hands in her lap.

“The pregnancy will show,” Padmé said.

“Not yet. Not for a few more months,” Anakin said, “that’s what the journals say.”

Of course Anakin had looked into it on his own. They’d talked, briefly, of what to expect, in hushed words together; but it had been another thing they let rest silently between them, for fear that to speak of it would disturb it. A silly superstition, she saw now.

“There are holos of my mother,” said Padmé, “and my sister when she was pregnant, and my grandmothers. My family does not have—” She wetted her lip, a childish gesture she found humiliating as soon as her tongue passed the corner of her mouth. “A history of discreet pregnancies. If we are very lucky, the baby won’t show until the end of the fourth month. But it’s likely that I’ll—grow by the start of next month.”

Anakin was shaking his head. “The journals say, for a first time mother, it’s not like that.”

“The journals can say whatever they want.” Padmé forced her hands out flat. She’d begun pulling the fabric of her gown into thick creases. “And maybe that’s true for most pregnancies, but I don’t think it will be true for ours. I think,” she said, very carefully, “that I should go into seclusion before the end of the second trimester.”

“No,” Anakin said; he began to stand. He was wild; she’d known that since that awful second trip to Tatooine; now as he rose once more with his hair like a storm cloud around his head, she saw it ever more clearly. And yet even as his ire struck, neatly as the first spark that set off a wildfire, Padmé found she was calming; she was cooling; she felt like a lake on a hot summer day without a breeze, still and uncaring.

“It’s for the best,” she forged on. “We have to think of our careers. A scandal might hurt my standing in the senate, but it will destroy your place with the Jedi.”

“I don’t care,” he said quickly, “the council is full of fools and old men, and whatever they think—”

“But we must be reasonable about this. We both agreed that we would have to keep the marriage a secret—”

“We never agreed anything about the baby—”

She held steady as his voice rose; he deepened with it.

“We _understood_ that the agreement would cover it.”

“I understood no such thing,” Anakin said. “You’re assuming that we agreed on something when we didn’t even talk about it—”

“When we decided to try for the baby,” Padmé countered, “I said that we would have to keep it to ourselves, and you agreed with me, you said that was the right decision—”

“Then, I said that _then_ , I never said that we should keep it secret always—”

“And when I told you that Ahsoka knew,” she challenged him, “I saw your face, I know that you were afraid—”

“Of what Ahsoka might think of me!” he said.

“And if the Jedi find out,” Padmé said. “If they know that you married in secret, that you are going to be a father—”

“Master Ki-Adi-Mundi had a family,” Anakin said lowly, “he had five wives, Padmé, _five_ , and the Jedi Order gave him dispensation for this, and all I want is to be married to you, to have my family, with _you_ —”

“Well, I’m glad you don’t want to marry anyone else,” Padmé said, half-laughing and knowing it unkind, “but that doesn’t change the fact that if they find out now, then you will never have the opportunity to become a master!”

“I don’t want to be a master!” Anakin shouted. 

Padmé caught the confession as she would a blow. The back of the sofa held her straight. His hair was wild, yes, and his voice rough, but his eyes, shining, were intent; he meant it, she realized.

“Of course you do,” Padmé said, struggling with this. “It’s what you’ve wanted all your life—”

“You’re what I’ve wanted!” Anakin ran his hands back through his hair. “And maybe—yes, I want the recognition, I want them to, to stop looking at me like they’re just waiting for me to fail—”

“That isn’t true. That isn’t how they look at you. Obi-Wan respects you; they all do. They took you in—”

His teeth showed. “They took me from my mother—”

“Everything you’ve worked for!” She threw her hands out, beseeching. “You’ll become a master—they’ll ask you to the council—”

“I don’t want to be on the council!” Again he raked at his hair; he tore at it. “I don’t want to be a master on the council, not when they demand these, these stupid things from the Jedi—”

“That doesn’t mean you can run away from it,” she said. “I disagreed with the chancellor, but I didn’t quit the senate just because I found his politics repulsive.”

“The chancellor is dead,” Anakin said, “so you might show some respect for him now at the very least—”

She laughed again, crueler now than before, and cast her gaze up to the ceiling. Respect! As if that was what she lacked!

“And I’m not running away from anything,” he said fiercely. “I’m allowed to decide my own fate, and maybe I don’t want it to be with the Jedi, on their sacred council!”

“And what will you do instead?” she demanded of him. “Have you thought any of it through? If you leave the Jedi, where will you go? What life will you live?”

“I’ll go with you,” Anakin said. His hands dropped before him, his palms to her. His back was curved, his neck a muted arc leaning to the side. He looked as if he might fall over. “I’ll just live—with you. That’s all I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. Even before I met you, that’s what I used to dream of, I think.”

Padmé looked up at him, her wild desert boy, and he wasn’t a boy at all anymore; he hadn’t been a boy for years. When she spoke, she did so with such aching slowness, but she did not want her voice to break; she did not want him to hear it in her, the fear sown deep.

“And if that was all you had,” she said. She looked at him and then away, because she could not bear to see him looking back at her so. “If everything you had—if that was only me—would you be happy?” Padmé made herself turn to him. She would not close her eyes. Her throat hurt terribly. “Would you? Could you be happy, with just the two of us, and no missions, no grand adventures, no—quests to undertake for the good of the people?”

“Yes,” said Anakin.

And once more she laughed, but the edge of it cut her instead. Padmé covered her eyes with her hand. She heard his jacket rustle as he moved closer to her.

“Could you? Can you promise,” she said, “that you would never look at me and hate me for taking you away from the Jedi, for trapping you in some quiet, little life?” She lowered her hand to her mouth; she let her hand fall entirely. Anakin was on his knees before her; he was reaching for her. “You can’t,” she said before he could answer her. “You can’t promise me that. I couldn’t promise you, if I lost my career with the senate, that I wouldn’t hold it against you.”

He flinched. His hand, near to her wrist, hesitated.

“So you see,” Padmé said, without triumph, “it’s for the best if I go into seclusion in a few months. I’ll go back to Naboo, and you will stay here.”

His fingertips settled on the side of her knee. She pressed her lips together at the touch. Kneeling, Anakin lifted his face to her. I was queen once, she thought. He’d knelt to her then, too, a little boy betrayed by a handmaiden who rose as a queen.

“I would be happy,” said Anakin. “I _would_.”

She closed her eyes. Evenly she said, “You’ll be a master soon.”

“Fuck the council,” Anakin snarled, “I’m tired of lying like this.”

It was your idea, she wanted to say. I told you, didn’t I, that you would hate it, that it would eat at us both, that our responsibilities demanded distance between us that could never allow for love: but she had come to him after Geonosis; she had been the one to kneel beside his medical cot and hold his hand and say, “Yes.”

“Do you think I enjoy it?” Padmé asked, too worn for disguise.

Anakin bowed his head. His brow pressed against her knee.

“What do you want from me?” he asked her, and he was worn as well.

She bent over his head. Her hands cloaked his nape. Her hair, now, made a curtain, and she felt how the breath shuddered through him.

“I want you to be happy,” Padmé admitted, very quietly. “I want our child to be safe. I want this damned war to be over, and I want you to come home, and I—want you not to regret it. That day when you married me by the lake.”

He reached back, grasping her wrist in his hand. His thumb was hard along the inside of her arm.

“I won’t regret it. I’ll never regret it.”

She wanted very much to believe him; but the force was alien to her, and when she looked to the future she saw nothing at all. Anakin slipped his hand slowly up her arm.

“Do you regret it?” he asked her.

Padmé turned so her cheek rested on top of his head. The tangled ends of his hair caught on her lips; they tickled her ear.

“No,” she said. “I don’t regret it.”

And Anakin, perhaps he saw something she could not: he sighed and took her hand from his nape to kiss the backs of her fingers, and when she made to pet his cheek with her fingernails, he tipped his face up so she might kiss him instead. She did kiss him then, gently on his harsh mouth. Anakin breathed out again, warm and deep. He said, “I’m sorry.”

Padmé, caressing the long edge of his cheekbone, said, “So am I,” and brushed her lips across his scarred eyebrow. His eyelashes were dark; they veiled his eyes. She kissed his other eyebrow, and as she kissed him she smoothed the wrinkles from his forehead with her thumb. He let her do this, accepting every touch, and when she was done she framed his face between her hands.

“I love you,” she said to him.

He’d always had such blue eyes. Lighter than his eyelashes, yes, but dark as water. Yet it was the sky of Tatooine she thought of when he looked up at her like so, that pale blue sky that stretched on without a spot of kindness. But you are kind, she thought of Anakin as she stroked his cheek again.

“I love you,” he said. He reached for her. “Padmé,” he called her; that was the name he’d known her by all these years, since the day they first met, before she’d stood up in that field and named herself Amidala. Padmé, so called, draped her arms over his shoulders and let Anakin lift her from the sofa, her legs slung over his arm and her fingers lacing at his nape. She loved him. She did, so much so at times she wished she’d never loved him at all. She wondered, as he carried her back to their bedroom, if he ever wished something like that too; and she wondered if loving was enough, if they could be happy. They’d been married for nearly three years and of those three years they had only lived together for a cumulative four months.

The bed was soft; it always was whether he was with her or not. Anakin bent to unlace his boots.

Padmé, alone on the bed, rose up onto her elbows. In the dark of the room, Anakin was a shadow, half-known and half-not.

“I want to be happy with you,” she said to that shadow. “That’s all I want.”

He stood and kicked the second boot off. It thumped against the baseboard and fell away.

“We will be happy,” he said, with such certainty.

The bed dipped. He climbed up beside her. In that absence of light she had nothing to go by but the nearness of his skin and the sound of his breath. On faith, she stretched her hands out, and she caught him. His shoulders curved; he sloped; he bent to her.

“Do you believe me?” he asked her.

His breath was warm and steady on her thigh; he was there in the dark with her. She swept her knuckles along his jaw.

“Yes,” Padmé said.


	2. Interlude.

The shops in Ninth Sector’s sky rung were way too hoity-toity for Ahsoka’s budget, but she knew how to play her hand. One large fizzy juice made her a paying customer and paying customers got a nice little seat right by the false window where they could spend some good quality time getting to know their drinks, if they paid for them; Ahsoka did. Ten credits, nice and easy. She rolled the glass between her hands; the twisty straw spun. Condensation slicked her skin. Nice and easy, sure: maybe before. 

A waiter gave her the once-over from across the room. Skinny Togruta, worn-out sandals, bright clothes from a discount place down on the middle rung. His lip pulled up. Ahsoka rounded her eyes at him, batted her lashes, and blew bubbles into her drink. Snooty jerk. Taking a teeny sip of the juice, and shuddering at the way it frizzled in her mouth, she turned her attention instead to the elaborate ceiling and window system. The café might be situated in the sky rung, but Coruscant’s sky was a crowded place, so like many of the shops that couldn’t afford roof-top rent, the owner had opted instead to spring for a standard holo immersion that replaced the ceiling with the illusion of a blue sky, clear of air traffic and smog, and the walls with a spectacular view looking out on an ocean Coruscant had lost millennia ago to the encroaching sprawl of civilization. Personally, she’d have preferred actual transparisteel windows looking out on the actual speeder lanes running between Coruscant’s starscrapers; then she could have seen Anakin’s approach.

Seen or unseen, she felt it. He was at the door; he was through it. She was sinking down in her seat like some dumb kid with the straw digging into the roof of her mouth and the glass slippery in her hands. The hostess greeted Anakin, and he said something to her but he was already walking past her, down the double wide aisle back to the two-seater table in the far corner. His hair was longer, but he still carried the lightsaber on his belt and he still walked like he thought maybe he was late for the action or maybe someone else would get there before he could. 

She spat the straw out. He got to the table before she’d sat all the way up, so she was stuck halfway to attention with her legs stuck out in the aisle and her back hunched. It was some time after the professional lunch hour; the café had few other customers, and so there were no well-dressed secretaries laughing noisily or large parties discussing politics and the war across tables pushed together. Quietude sat on Ahsoka’s shoulders. Her old master opened his mouth; then he closed it abruptly again, and his teeth clicked together. She curled her toes. The woven leather of the sandals scraped the tips of them.

Ahsoka set her glass on the table. That clicked, too. Slick, the glass slid a half-inch across the table and then stuck. She smiled at Anakin.

“Hey, Skyguy,” she said.

The inside corners of his hairy eyebrows pinched. Then, only just, some small muscles in his cheeks twitched, and he too smiled. Only just.

“Hey, Snips,” he said.

“Stop standing around like that,” she said, puffing her face, “looking like you’re gonna bust somebody. You’re making me think I gotta start kicking windows out.”

Anakin flipped his jacket back and sat across from her. His face ducked; that mess of hair got before his eyes. When he looked up again, the smile was something she recognized. 

“Do you have to kick a lot of windows out?”

“Not a whole lot,” she hedged, and she chanced another smile, from up between her head tails. 

The lines of his face eased, and then they tightened again; he resolved into a person very distant from her, with awful eyes, sad ones. As if from very near, right in her ears, she could hear a steady thumping; but of course that was her own heart beating double time. A pressure like a squeezing hand caught her stomach. The café was quiet. They were silent. Anakin’s hands, laid flat on the table, moved. One of them fisted; the other hand closed over his wrist. 

I could kick out the window, Ahsoka thought. It was a funny little thought. She didn’t think Anakin would laugh. She didn’t think she’d laugh either. 

Ahsoka looked fixedly at the glass of fizzy juice; she looked through it, the stained yellow of the drink and the bubbles that crept one two three up the sides, at Anakin’s clenched hands. Two bubbles coalesced into one and that one bubble trickled inevitably up to the surface where it popped. Padmé had suggested to Ahsoka that she write out a list of everything she wanted to say to Anakin. 

“What—like a script?” Ahsoka had asked. She’d wrinkled her nose at the thought. 

Padmé laughed and set her tea down. Shizi tea, she’d explained to Ahsoka, to help with the pregnancy sickness; a traditional remedy on Naboo.

“Not a script. It’s more like—” Padmé glanced up, thinking. Her fingers traced the lip of the cup. “A to-do list. Sometimes, when I’m very nervous about something, it helps to write out what I want to say and do. So I feel like I’m ready for it.”

“What do you get nervous about?” Ahsoka had blurted. She’d known it was a spit-brained thing to say right as it came off her tongue but by that time she couldn’t choke it down again.

But Padmé hadn’t laughed at Ahsoka or reminded her of how just a half hour before Padmé had clutched Ahsoka and begged her not to tell anyone. She’d looked at Ahsoka, sitting beside her on the sofa, and smiled with just the corner of her mouth.

“Why don’t you think I get nervous?”

Ahsoka hunched her shoulders up. “I don’t know. You’re just always so—calm. Really together.” That wasn’t the whole of it, but Ahsoka hadn’t known how to say it, that Padmé was very precise; that she was in some small, quiet ways more like a Jedi in temperament and philosophy than so many Jedi that Ahsoka had known. Glancing at Padmé then, Padmé with her serenity draped over her again, Ahsoka had known another moment’s tongue-tiedness, the sort of sticky mouth she tried not to admit. Her tongue had got clammy like that around Lux Bonteri and Offee, too, Barriss with the freckly spots on her nose. 

Ahsoka looked away from Padmé. Her chest was aching. Don’t think about Offee, she said to herself over and over again, and yet she kept thinking of her friend, of Offee shouting to the court that she had done it; she had set the bombs; she had killed those people, and she had put it all on Ahsoka. Barriss had been her friend. Jedi have no attachments, Ahsoka thought; but Ahsoka was not a Jedi, and Barriss Offee was not her friend.

“I’m not always as calm as I appear to you,” Padmé said into that stillness, “or to the senate, or the media. Or even to—” She hesitated. “To Anakin.”

“So you make lists?” Ahsoka had asked. “And that helps?”

Padmé reached for her tea. “I organize my thoughts. I marshal my words. Like generals do before a battle. And if I’m prepared, then even if I’m frightened, I can set my fear aside.”

Now, seated across the table from her no-longer-her master, Ahsoka could not remember anything she’d written out the night before. His fingernails were uneven. She saw that clearly through the glass. An unfamiliar scar notched the first knuckle of the third finger of his flesh hand. He still wore a glove over the prosthetic hand. Carbonation did its work in the glass.

“I don’t like fizzy juice,” Ahsoka said.

The left hand, flesh, fisted, softened. The tension in his fingers ran out. He looked up to her.

“You don’t?”

She made a face and shook her head. “It’s yucky. I don’t like all the bubbles. They make my mouth hurt. It’s like eating that pop candy that explodes in your throat.”

Anakin wrinkled his nose and then—his shoulders tipping—he said, laughingly, “Then why do you drink it?”

“Well, I wasn’t supposed to drink it when I was a padawan,” she said. “ _You_ know.”

The laugh faded away. His hands were flat again, though, loose on the table.

“Yes,” he said, “I do.”

Ahsoka’s fingertips were dull with cold. The last of the other diners left through the door; they were alone in the café but for the staff, and only two of them remained. She pushed the glass away.

“I know you picked this place out, Master,” she said, “but I’m not really hungry and—” And she staggered; she stopped; her tongue turned in her mouth. She wasn’t a Jedi, and Barriss Offee wasn’t her friend, and Ahsoka had no master.

Anakin rose. The folds of his long jacket fell down past his hips.

“Let’s go,” he said only. So they went, Ahsoka walking double fast to keep up with his long stride; then she nearly passed him. The tops of her montrals were taller than his shoulders, she realized. Padmé had said Ahsoka was taller, but Ahsoka hadn’t thought— A strange exhilaration got into her feet, and she bounced as she stretched her legs out. She didn’t have to walk fast at all. She was almost of a pace with him, and Anakin, as if he’d forgotten the months they’d been apart, had already adjusted his stride so that they matched again.

“You’ve grown,” he said to her, as they climbed the outside stairs to the glass-enclosed roof gardens that arched from one starscraper to the next, all along the block.

Ahsoka, running lightly up the railing, did a flip forward onto her hands so she could look back at him. Her head tails flopped down; she shook them out of the way.

“Course I grew. Just because you’re stuck where you are doesn’t mean I can’t keep growing.”

He gave her a look, the old, dry one. “You’re still just a little snip.”

“No, you’re just a weirdy giant.” At the next landing, where the stairs turned to go up the far side of the building, she swung back onto her feet. “Why do humans grow so big anyway?”

“Why do Togruta grow so small?”

“I’m going to be tall for a Togruta.” She stretched up onto her toes. The sandals creaked. “I’ll use the force to boost my growth spurts, so I’ll wind up even taller than you.”

“You won’t be able to walk,” he said mildly. “Your montrals will pull you over.”

She hopped down at the entrance to the gardens and smacked the door release pad. “No lecture about how that’s a selfish perversion of the force, and I should do what you say and not what you do?”

The door hissed open. The thick perfume of jungle washed between them, and the sound of a bird shrieking echoed in her horns. Anakin stood there at the threshold, looking at her, and he said, “No. I think that you’re free now to decide these things for yourself.”

Her nose hurt. She rubbed at it and preceded him into the gardens, trying to think not about how her nose burned but how sweetly the effusion of Karitete flowers at the entrance had bloomed. The gardens were a hothouse, a sweltering change from the chill of Coruscant’s sky rung, up high where the winds were cold no matter how warm a day had been scheduled for the sector. Tangles of vines, cut back from the multitude of pathways that ran flat or arced throughout the vast rooftop garden, had begun to creep out again. Ahsoka clasped her hands together at her back and looked up at the patchwork greenery, at the swollen flowers that hung like lanterns in asymmetrical clusters along the way.

It was Anakin who spoke next.

“So what are you doing now?”

She scratched at her wrist. Somewhere in the shadows, a bird hopped; she caught just a glimpse of its scarlet plumage, but she heard its soft cooing.

“Um, not much. Nothing really exciting,” she admitted. “It’s kind of boring. I’m working for this courier company over in tenth mid, and sometimes they give me extra hours for transcription stuff.” She didn’t mean to do it but she did glance at Anakin then, to see if—she didn’t want to see it. Already she was saying: “I looked into it but I can’t do security stuff, not the legal kind anyway, until I’m seventeen, and I can’t do police stuff until I’m eighteen, and I don’t—I’m not gonna—I’m not a rat fink _bounty hunter_ ,” she said fiercely. “And I’m not a _smuggler_.”

But all Anakin said was, “You can’t do police work?”

“I’m too young,” Ahsoka said. She did walk double fast then, to get ahead of him and under the thicker canopy ahead, where the shadows were deepest. 

“’Cause it turns out,” she called back to him, “that it’s not like—no one else official lets kids do—” She threw her arms out. Her hands, turned up to the heavy blossoms, bent back at the wrists; she fisted her fingers. “I can’t fight for anyone. And I don’t really know anything else.”

His hand brushed her shoulder.

“You know many things,” he said to her.

“Nothing I can use,” Ahsoka said. She dropped her hands. “Nothing any job could use, any real job.”

“You have talents, Ahsoka—”

She rounded so sharply on him that he had to stop, stop talking, stop walking, cut off short by her.

“You think any of them matter?” Her teeth ached now too, same as her nose. “Maybe force reading—mind tricks—that stuff I could use, if I worked for Black Sun. If I worked for _Hutts_.”

His face shuttered. She’d known that would stick at him; she wished she hadn’t said it. 

“If I can help—”

Ahsoka turned from him. She folded her arms over her chest and kept walking; she kept moving. If he followed her, fine.

“I don’t need any help,” she said, too fast. “This is my life now, and I’m going to—I’m fine. I have an apartment, and I’m working, and I’m learning.”

“Ahsoka,” he said.

“And you didn’t tell me about any of this stuff!” She whirled again; her head tails thumped her shoulders. “I didn’t know about rent. I didn’t know that you have to—You want to leave,” she said instead. “You still do. There’s no discretionary funds, Skyguy. They don’t give you credit tabs. I have to earn credits, and I had to pay for that drink with my own money, and that was ten credits that I, I could have got enough food for two whole days with that in the ground rung, and it wouldn’t be good food but now I _can’t_ because you said let’s meet at this stupid fancy place—”

Her voice was breaking. She didn’t want to crack; she cracked anyway. Anakin reached out to her again. She let him. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder, very cautiously, as if they were strangers, and when she didn’t push him away, he wrapped the other arm around her too. Her fingers dug into her elbows. She kept her arms folded. Blinking furiously, she found her eyes were wet. He rested his cheek on top of her head. His skin was cool against her skin; he was always such to her. Humans ran so cold. She could hear his pulse in his throat. She heard it when he drew in a rough breath before he spoke.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“I have to do this on my own,” she said, muffled in his shoulder.

“I would have helped you—”

“You can’t.” She turned so her cheek was fitted to the long stretch of his clavicle, so she looked out along his shoulder, at the way the vines knotted along the path. Dully she said, “You’re a Jedi Knight, Skyguy, and I’m an apostate. They’re not gonna make you a master if you’re still talking to me. No attachments, remember?”

His arms tightened around her. Ahsoka wrinkled her nose as hard as she could, trying to get the Hutt-faced, spit-shit tears to go back down but it was like saying something you didn’t mean to; it was like—kicking out a window, she thought, and the glass came out but you couldn’t cram it back together.

“You saw Padmé,” said Anakin.

Ahsoka nodded. She couldn’t, really, the way he was holding on to her.

“I’m going to be a father,” he said. “The council isn’t going to look very highly on that either.”

Ahsoka’s arms were loosening. She didn’t have a father, not one she remembered. She had no family at all. 

“Padmé said, she was going to go into hiding,” Ahsoka said. “So the Jedi wouldn’t know that the baby was yours.”

“She isn’t,” Anakin said, with flat certainty. “I won’t let her.”

“You can’t _make_ her—”

“Ahsoka.”

His arms parted. He settled his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back; he held her, still, and he held her still. He looked at her, but he did not see her. Something else was in him.

“They took my mother from me,” he said to Ahsoka.

She hooked her hand around his elbow. She tried to say, “Every Jedi is taken from their family,” but Anakin hadn’t stopped.

“I was ten,” he said. “And the next time I saw her, she was dying. The Jedi didn’t kill her, but I wasn’t there to protect her because of the Jedi. And then they took you from me—”

“I left,” Ahsoka said, “I did that on my own—”

“Because of what they did to you!” He shook her, once, and she knocked his arms away. His hands fell from her. One fell into a fist. A bird nearby rustled in the leaves, and a cat was yowling plaintively somewhere.

“I won’t let them take my wife from me too,” Anakin said. He was in shadow; they were both in shadow. “And they won’t have my child. They’re not taking any more of my family, not now, not ever. _I won’t let them_.”

She looked at him in the thin light the canopy allowed. The gardens were hot, sweatily so, and yet she did not sweat, though she could see the telltale glimmering on Anakin’s skin, the faint flushing of his cheeks. He would have been very uncomfortable on Shili, with its deep valleys overflowing with riotous jungle, those vast swaths of rainforest. The canopies there had been so thick, at night she could make out only her palms in the dark, her fingers lost.

“I went to Shili,” Ahsoka said. “That’s where I’m from. Originally, I mean, before Master Plo Koon found me. I thought maybe I could learn something about…” She gestured vaguely at first and settled for pointing to herself. “The Togruta live in tribes there. Really big family clans. If I could find my clan, I figured. That sounds really silly now, like how could I find one group on the whole planet that I could say, yeah, that’s _mine_ , when I don’t even know—anyone.”

Whatever anger had sustained Anakin faded from him. His shoulders relaxed. 

“What did you find?” he prompted.

“That I didn’t fit in,” she said. “You’re not supposed to be—an individual, if you’re Togruta. They do everything together, and you have to, you think with the group. They don’t argue, ever, and all I do is argue about everything.” She didn’t hold it against Master Plo Koon, not really. As a child, when she’d tried to remember her family on Shili, she’d found nothing more than a distant impression of happiness, and that was certainly no stronger than her happiness when Master Plo Koon visited Clawmouse and held his hands out to her and let her sit with him to talk. 

“They don’t wear shoes on Shili,” she said. She stuck her foot out so he could see the sandals she’d traded her boots for. “It’s to keep them connected to the earth. They feel it; that’s part of what ties them all together in the pack. So I, um, I took off my boots, and I walked like they did, barefoot.” Ahsoka looked at her own toes. She set her foot down. “Do you know what I felt?”

Gently he asked her, “What did you feel?”

“Nothing,” she said. She wiggled her toes. The weaving still worried her feet. “I didn’t feel anything. Just dirt and grass.”

“You aren’t wearing your head dress anymore,” he said.

“Togruta wear the akul-tooth headdress,” Ahsoka said, “and I’m not really Togruta. Am I?” She tried to smile at him, but it wasn’t the smile that came out.

Anakin gave her his arm again, and she turned; she buried her face in his chest. She hated to cry. It left her tired, her head hurting, her ears stinging. She knotted her fingers in his jacket; the leather groaned as she pulled at it, beating her fists once, twice, against his back.

“I should have been there,” he said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t.”

“You couldn’t have changed it,” she mumbled. “Not even you, Skyguy. Head up in the clouds. Thinking you’re so great that you can do any—anything.”

Her heels lifted off the path. Gravel scraped underfoot. He was rocking her, very softly, from one side to the other, and he was still so much taller than her that she drifted on her toes. Anakin sighed. She closed her eyes and thought, she’d left snot all over his shirt. Well, he could afford to clean it.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you,” Ahsoka said at last.

He was silent for a long moment, holding her like that.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “that I wasn’t someone you could trust.”

She took a deep breath and unwound her arm, long enough to wipe at her face. With her arm over her eyes, she said, “I do trust you. I just didn’t—I didn’t want you to be ashamed of me. For leaving.”

“I will never be ashamed of you,” Anakin told her, and he squeezed her shoulder in such a way that she wanted to cry all over again.

Instead, she brought her arm down and her eyes up; she did smile then, though it couldn’t have been a terribly strong smile.

“Senator Amidala said that—she thought you were worried,” Ahsoka said, “about being a dad. But I think that—” She swallowed. Already her head throbbed; her eyes felt blistered with tears. “You’re gonna do okay.”

On Shili, looking for a face that matched her own, markings that might tell her if someone was related to her, if she’d found the clan to whom she belonged, she had thought now and then of who her parents might be, who her father would be; and it hadn’t been her face she’d seen or Master Plo Koon’s, but Anakin’s as he’d clapped her back and said, “Well done, Snips,” and then smiled at her.

Anakin touched her stinging nose, just to flick it. She scowled and batted at him. He was smiling now, that smile that was almost what she’d remembered but older now, in some way she couldn’t define, as if he too had grown while she was racking up inches in her legs and her horns. She wanted to ask him, do you have nightmares, too? Do you wake up at night, thinking about the soldiers that died because of mistakes you made? But Jedi didn’t have nightmares. Ahsoka did, most nights since she’d left the order. She’d gone to apply to the police academy on Coruscant and they’d told her she was too young, and she’d wanted to laugh because what she remembered was Captain Rex calling her kid and little one and then telling her she was calling the shots.

“Thank you,” Anakin said, smiling at her almost like he used to smile at her. “For coming back.”

“I know that—I’m not supposed to,” she said, and she wasn’t a Jedi any more, she wasn’t, but she remembered: let it go, let them go, let go of hate, let go of love, _find peace in the absence_. She remembered, too, Padmé, very composed after she’d finished shaking in Ahsoka’s arms, asking C3PO for more tea and then saying to Ahsoka, “I don’t regret it,” as her hand rose from her lap to brush her belly.

Ahsoka grasped Anakin’s sleeve; she held on to it tightly, so very tightly, like Senator Amidala had held on to Ahsoka.

“But I really—I really missed you,” Ahsoka said.

“It’s all right,” Anakin told her, and he turned his hand so he cupped her arm as she clutched his. “It isn’t a bad thing.” That wasn’t what a true Master would say; but he wasn’t Ahsoka’s master anymore, and she wasn’t his padawan learner, and she thought: yeah. It was okay.

“I missed you,” she said again, “I _really missed you_ ,” and Anakin said, “I know,” and she was—Ahsoka was glad, glad she’d gone to see Padmé, glad she’d listened to Padmé, glad that she was here now; and she thought, then, in the rooftop garden, that everything _would_ be okay after all. It had to be, after everything that had happened. No more bad things, she thought, and it was a wish as much as anything else. No more bad things. Please, Ahsoka thought. She didn’t know how much faith she had left, but surely—Surely.

Anakin said, “You must be hungry. Let’s go find some ice cream. My treat.”

She wiped at her face again, scrubbing at her eyes and cheeks and nose with her hands. She wanted it off, all of it, the tears and the snot, the burning in her skin.

“If you’re paying,” Ahsoka said. When she brought her hands down, she smiled at Anakin.


	3. Four Months. (1)

In the great openness of her senatorial office, Padmé had elected to set the desk near to the bank of windows looking out across the Felim Rooftop Jungle so that she might have a little splash of green to look at now and then. The rest of the office was decorated simply: book shelves at the back of the desk, three chairs before the desk and one behind it, and in the adjoining room a sort of parlor with a long rectangular table framed by two settee sofas and two matching chairs at the ends. So when, halfway to the desk from the door, a sensation of floating closed about her like a vise, Padmé had no recourse but to continue walking. She did so with her shoulders straight and her head up, at as unhurried a pace as she could manage, for Padmé knew that if she did walk any faster, she would vomit, and Mon Mothma had followed her into the office. If possible, she would prefer not to throw up in front of the younger senator. She wished very badly that she’d one of the chairs from the parlor to fall upon.

It was like the world was a top, and now its spin had grown erratic; it wobbled from one side to the other, dipping lowly here before swinging up again. Heat crawled along her scalp. She did not dare look to the windows or her reflection there; she feared she would find her face bloodless and sweat prickling along her throat. 

“Thank you for inviting me to your office,” Mon Mothma was saying. “You have a truly lovely view.”

“Yes,” Padmé said. She’d got to the desk, at last. She braced her hand on the corner; her fingers splayed, and she held herself upright though the small of her back seemed to have gone to liquid. “I was very fortunate in the assignment. It isn’t so large as my last office but the view makes up for any loss of space.” 

The spinning was slowing now, yet she’d still such a crawling in her gut, a sort of dread that had wormed up from some place outside of her.

“Truly lovely,” said Mon Mothma again, at the window. “You might forget what trees look like on Coruscant without something like this.”

Padmé looked to the window. Mon Mothma had touched the transparisteel pane with her fingers, and her reflection smiled at Padmé. It was not Mon Mothma’s reflection that arrested Padmé; it was the man that stood beside Mothma in the window. He was all in black with a flared helmet shaped on the front like a skull, and he towered like a shadow over everything. She knew him, though she could not say how. She knew him very well. The tall man all in black was looking down from the window, and Padmé thought there was something terribly sad about him and something simply terrible, too. His head lifted. He turned. No, she thought; don’t look at me. Those awful skull eyes fixed on her reflection. Don’t see me, she thought very clearly. As clearly, he did.

“Senator Amidala,” said Mon Mothma in a question.

Padmé started. The man had gone. A tightening in the air that she hadn’t even noticed had gone with him. Reflected in the window were only Padmé, distant and pale, and Mon Mothma who was turning from her consideration of the garden below to look at Padmé properly.

“Are you all right?”

She eased out her breath and smiled at Mothma. “Yes, I’m fine. It’s only I just remembered I forgot to eat, when I felt faint.” And she laughed, to show how absurd she knew it was to have forgotten to eat in the morning. The truth, of course, was that she’d eaten very well that morning, with Anakin fussing at her to take a snack in her bag, as if she couldn’t order something in to her office if she felt a craving before lunch. 

“Forgot to eat!” Her hands folded before her, Mothma crossed to the desk as Padmé stepped behind it and took her seat. A flash of Mothma’s humor, usually so thoroughly packed away, showed. “How can you look after the health of the republic if you won’t mind your own?”

“I know, I know,” said Padmé, still smiling ruefully, “but there’s so much to be done now with the war nearly over that when I wake up in the morning, breakfast is the last thing on my mind.”

“The war _is_ over,” said Mon Mothma, who for all her poise and insight was still young, though not much younger than Padmé; her planet, Chandrila, had known so little strife.

“Not yet,” said Padmé, thinking even as she said this how much had changed in two months. She smoothed out her sleeves, a nervous gesture she made into something regal. “General Grievous is as yet at large. The Separatist army has broken, but only into smaller armies that would still fight. It will be,” she said, looking to Mon Mothma, “some time before the war is truly over.”

“But it will be over,” Mon Mothma said. “Count Dooku is dead. The serpent has no head to guide it. The Jedi will soon capture Grievous, and then it will all be done.”

“Ideas remain.” Padmé touched the blank datapad on her desk, the stylus beside it. A lingering impression of unearthliness had her wanting to assure the reality of the office. “You see how the senate still struggles to undo what Palpatine had done to it.” 

This was the work that had kept her at the office long hours, to decentralize a government Palpatine had steadily organized to serve the office of supreme chancellor above all others. It hadn’t stolen her appetite yet; she’d the child to thank for that, as she had in the past neglected things like food, as she still did sleep, in her focus. Now, she could not afford to ignore her hunger. Anakin would not have let her anyway.

“I know it a cruel thing to say,” said Mon Mothma, “but I am glad the chancellor is dead. If he had continued on his path, I do not think it would have been a separatist’s war that followed.”

“You are a radical!” said Padmé, delighted.

Mothma tipped her chin up in protect. “And if the republic should be threatened, would you not have fought for it?”

From her desk, by the window, Padmé could see the vibrant greenhouse jungle, stretched across four square blocks of roofs. A beautification measure, certainly, but it was also an answer to a question of security, to remove surfaces on which speeders and larger vehicles might land. Air space about the senate was so tightly controlled, and no flat roof would be permitted about it. Thus, something truly lovely, as Mon Mothma had said, had come out of the durasteel and concrete of Coruscant’s unending city skyline. She could see this, yes, if she would look, but she did not turn from Mothma.

“I have waged war before,” Padmé said. “So let’s be thankful that when this war has ended, we won’t have another one on our hands.”

Mon Mothma inclined her head. Young, and given to the presumptions of one who had come out of peace: of clean ends, and surety in one’s might. She was observant, though, and passionate, and Padmé herself was not unfamiliar with presumptions of rightness. 

Summoning brightness, Padmé said, “So, you wished to speak with me?”

“Yes.” Mon Mothma straightened. “The election is coming up within the senate to select the new chancellor.”

“I know,” said Padmé. Politics, then. She relaxed into the thought. The emergency chancellor, selected by Palpatine to govern, till a proper election could be held, should anything happen to him, had little skill in politics. The appointment of Senator Glil had, to Padmé, proved the thoroughness of Palpatine’s arrogance, that he should have named a wealthy but weak crony a successor rather than a competent person. 

“Senator Organa has my full support in his campaign. Has he spoken of selecting a running mate with you?” Padmé asked. It was a polite question, half-idle. If Bail had settled on any person, he would have mentioned such to Padmé at any time during their many weekly chats. Padmé shifted discreetly in her chair—the low sling of her back had begun to ache, as it did with greater frequency these days—and wished for a cup of tea. In a moment she would ring for that. Something bitter, rather than sweet; her tastes were changing. She wondered what it meant that the baby wanted bitter teas and sour cheeses. Likely nothing. Sola would know, but of course Padmé could not ask Sola. 

“Not yet,” Mon Mothma hedged, and Padmé glanced at her, “though I believe he is considering one person in particular.” She tapped her fingers once, and then she looked directly at Padmé, both listening to Mon Mothma and trying to recall what Sola had said of cravings years before when she was carrying Pooja. 

“Senator Amidala,” Mon Mothma said in her quiet, precise way, “I am recommending you for the position of vice-chair of the senate.”

Padmé, thinking of tea, lost the thought. The whole of the office was suddenly, starkly clear. The wandering fog that the man in shadow had brought with him dissipated. Mon Mothma, kitted in severe white, had folded her hands one upon the other in her lap. She was very serious, and she waited for Padmé to answer. Padmé’s lips parted; she felt them do this. She felt her tongue stick to the backs of her teeth. Her chest, she felt that tighten. She ought to have called for the tea earlier.

“That’s very flattering, Senator—”

“I do not flatter,” said Mon Mothma. “You are more suitable for the position than any other. Your leadership during the Separatist War has been crucial, both to the Republic’s victory and its wholeness.”

“Custom suggests the vice-chair should be of another party,” Padmé said, “and I’m afraid Bail and I have worked too closely with one another for far too long—”

“All the better.” Mon Mothma spread one hand out. “Custom may suggest one thing, but what the Republic needs now is stability. The work you have done with Senator Organa is ample proof there is no one better to serve the senate as vice-chair. And the impeachability of your character, the surety of your devotion to the Republic, they cannot be questioned.”

Padmé smiled, too quickly. She tried to make it a joke. “I don’t have nearly enough experience—”

“There is no call for humility.” Mon Mothma, entirely in earnest, leaned forward. “You have lived in service to the people since you were twelve, longer than I, longer than many.”

The list of her accomplishments loomed. Soon Mothma would begin to recite them. Vice-chair, Padmé thought. Her heart quickened; her gut quickened as well. To serve the senate in any capacity was an honor. To serve the people was reward all its own. The sacrifice of the self for duty: that was a cause just and true. These were all things known to her; she believed them. Devoutly, she believed them. But to be vice-chair of the senate! Selfishly she wanted it, and she knew it to be selfishness. If she were vice-chair, she could garner and strengthen support for trade regulations now foundering; she could oversee the sweeping political reforms needed even before Palpatine’s rise to power. She might, perhaps, aspire to the position of chancellor in the far future.

“I cannot,” Padmé said. She said it firmly. 

“Why not?”

“I’ve read of Chandrila,” Padmé said to Mon Mothma. “Your planet boasts an open forum, where citizens of all political persuasions may argue their positions freely, without persecution.”

Mon Mothma understood. Before Padmé could finish, she said, “You would not misuse your power,” with a faith Padmé’d experience enough to recognize she did not deserve.

Padmé clasped her hands on the desk. It was her belly she wanted to touch, the growing roundness she wanted to hold, to find a rooting in it. She’d begun wearing looser gowns with high waists, cinched beneath the breasts, in the mountain tradition of Theed, to hide what she soon could not. Curious, looking at Mon Mothma over the great expanse of the desk; the desk was not very wide, as Padmé wished to encourage the thought of intimacy, but she felt it to be vast now. She had worked with Mon Mothma for several years, and she called Mothma a friend. Now Padmé thought, she does not know; she does not know me; she is what I should have been if I had not gone to Anakin and told him I would marry him. As though in a dream, Padmé saw not Mothma but another Padmé seated across from her, a Padmé whose face had not begun to round as her belly rounded. Padmé closed her eyes. She wished the ghosts away: the dark man she did and did not know; the self she was not.

“Once I would have said the same of Palpatine,” Padmé said.

“You are not Palpatine.”

One day, Padmé thought, Mon Mothma will be chancellor. She thought—wistfully, she knew—that Mon Mothma would be righteous; she would be kind; she would serve the senate and the people truly, selflessly. It was not power Mothma wanted, nor was it prestige she sought. She was wholly devoted to the cause she had taken up, and Padmé—

“This is what I choose,” said Padmé, opening her eyes again. “I will not be vice-chair of the senate. If Senator Organa should ask, I will suggest your name to him.”

Of all things, Mon Mothma looked stricken. Padmé might have laughed, thinking how just a moment ago she must have appeared much the same to Mothma.

“I do not want the position,” Mothma protested.

“And I do not deserve it,” said Padmé, “though I expect you won’t believe me no matter what I tell you. You are an idealist, Senator Mothma.” Padmé smiled at her. “You always think the best of everyone. You _expect_ the best of everyone. You have aligned yourself with no party; you will work with anyone, even those with whom you most strongly disagree, if it means the people will benefit. I, on the other hand,” Padmé confessed, “have a temper, and I gladly make enemies. I abhor compromising, and when I’ve decided to dislike someone, I cannot be persuaded to allow them to have good qualities.”

Puzzled, Mon Mothma said, “Yet I have never seen evidence of this in you.”

“Because,” Padmé said with practiced lightness, “I am too good a politician to be vice-chair.” She meant too good a liar, but she could hardly say that, could she?

*

“Vice-chair?” Anakin repeated. He’d paused, a rag in hand, the components of his lightsaber laid out on a clean sheet at the end of the table. The more sensitive pieces, including the delicate crystal that gave the blade its color and its power, remained sealed in the internal casing of the handle; those, he’d explained, required a cleaner environment for this task. He set the rag down.

“That’s wonderful, Padmé! Vice-chair—that’s nearly as good as chancellor.”

She scoffed at him over the fresher door. “We’re going to have to work on that before you’re a father. You can’t tell the baby a wet diaper is nearly as good as a full one.”

“What? It’s true, isn’t it?” He frowned. The dear lines showed between his eyebrows again. “You’d be in charge of the senate, while Chancellor Glil runs everything else. That’s perfect. _You’re_ perfect,” he said fondly. “And you’d be chancellor in just a few years.”

“Well, it won’t be Chancellor Glil,” she said, closing the fresher. “Senator Organa will be chancellor at the end of the summer.” She carried the plate of crisped apple slices to the table. Normally she sat next to Anakin or across from him, but she took the chair at the far end, out of respect for all the nasty-smelling oils he’d set out.

Anakin turned a length of lightsaber shell around in the rag, thinking. Slowly he said, “Bail’s decisive. A strong leader. He isn’t afraid of confrontation, when it comes to that.”

“It always comes to confrontation with you,” Padmé said, in the fashion of an old joke, and Anakin looked up from the rag and flattened his brows at her; he squinted; he screwed up his mouth so his nose pushed up too. 

Sometimes she found it hard to believe anyone could fear Anakin when he made faces like that, as he had when he was still a little boy who’d made shadow puppets with her in the hold of the ship, far from Tatooine, far from Naboo, somewhere en route to Coruscant. If they weren’t seated as far from each other as the table allowed, she would have leaned over and kissed him, but sitting, she found she didn’t very much want to stand up right away. The little spot in her back that always ached so had relaxed.

“And anyway,” she went on, peeling back the wrap from the plate, “I said no.”

“You said—” He dropped the rag and that curving, fitted piece of metal. “Padmé! Vice-chair of the senate!”

She took a bite from one of the apple slices. Crisped and spiced lightly with a verr juice infusion: the result was immensely sour. Her tongue could have withered away from it. She took another bite, chewed carefully, and swallowed. Her lips stung.

“I know what the position is.”

“They wanted you for vice-chair and you said no?”

“It was only a suggestion,” Padmé said, “from Senator Mothma, and I turned her down.”

“But you would be vice-chair of the senate,” he said, “you would be one of the leaders of the Republic—we need leaders like you, people who actually care for the Republic and know what’s going on out there instead of sitting around in their offices getting rich and placid and stupid. You could make them get up off their asses—”

“I don’t want to argue about politics tonight,” she said.

“You agree with me,” he argued. “You complain about them as often as I do. If you’re vice-chair you could do something about them. Strip their powers, or—dock their pay—”

Padmé set down the next slice she’d started on. “The senate doesn’t work like the military does. I can’t just remove a senator’s power. Not simply can’t—I wouldn’t. As an elected body, we are chosen by the people to represent their varied interests and needs, and just because I might disagree with someone doesn’t mean ethically I can just—kick them out. We argue about politics,” she said pointedly, “and yet we’ve never locked each other out.”

“That’s different. We’re married. We love each other.”

“And the senators love the Republic—”

“Oh, that’s so idealistic,” he said. He stabbed a finger at her. “You know that the only thing Senator B’erarm loves is the girls he pays to dance for him.”

Of course Anakin would name a senator associated with Padmé’s party. She fired back: “And the emergency chancellor is a lowly sycophant without the qualifications to even stand as head of a single committee.”

“I thought you didn’t want to argue about politics,” Anakin said.

Padmé looked at him across the table. He was lashing out at her, she knew, for reasons other than the ones they had voiced. That did not mean she had to accept his temper, his fear of being condescended to, without complaint.

“I don’t,” she said, tired. “I don’t want to argue about anything with you. I love you, and you’re so rarely home. But this is my life, Anakin; this is my _career_. I’m a politician.”

“And the vice-chair is everything you deserve,” he said to her, quieter now. “You’ve worked for so long. You earned this.”

“I don’t want it,” she said. She reached for an apple slice and then she let her hand slip away to her lap. “I’ve seen how power corrupts. And if I take the chair now…” She touched her belly. Anakin’s eyes dropped. The curve was still small, smaller than she had hoped for; small enough she had, once or twice, worried something might be wrong.

“In two months, I will go into seclusion,” Padmé said. “That will be in the middle of the election. I can’t afford to be pregnant before the public, especially if I’m campaigning for vice-chair. And if I were, somehow, to be elected to the position, and if the truth of my child were to be found out, it would destroy my career. It would tarnish Senator Organa’s; it would damage the party.”

“Don’t go into seclusion,” he said again, as he always did. “I’ll leave the order, and when I do, it won’t matter. No one will care if we’re married.”

“You won’t leave the Jedi.” She faced him. “They still need you. And you like being the hero.”

“I don’t care about being a hero—”

“Yes, you do, Annie,” Padmé said, smiling, “you always have. Even when you were little.”

Lowly he said, “I’m not a child anymore, Padmé.”

Her smile faded. He was tall now, her Anakin. Twenty when they’d married, he was nearly twenty-three now, and he’d found another two inches between that day they’d married at the lake and this night. He wore his hair long and wild, and the scar that divided his eyebrow and marked his cheek made him appear older than he was. They had neither of them been children for very long. Only three years since Geonosis and the start of the war, and yet she felt so old; she felt it marrow-deep.

“I know you aren’t,” she said.

“Then don’t treat me like one,” he said, leaning forward. He’d forgotten the lightsaber entirely. A smear of grease had blacked his plain, cream shirt along the forearm. “I don’t need to be the hero.”

“The Republic needs you to be one.”

“And what do you need me to be?” Anakin asked her. An accusation sat in that. “Who am I supposed to be, for you? The Jedi want their chosen one, and the Republic wants a hero. So what do you want?”

The sour tang had lingered in her mouth. When she swallowed, she tasted it.

“I want you to be Anakin,” she said, and she was still so very tired. “And I want us to stop arguing. Sometimes we fight, and I’m just so afraid—” She pressed her lips together. She wouldn’t finish it.

He was silent for a long, awful breath, and then he said, in a strange voice, “Of me.” 

The nightmares, she thought. How he woke in the night sometimes, wild-eyed and certain the war had come to them; that she was in danger, that the Separatists had taken Coruscant. She would stroke the hair back from his sweat-slick brow and tell him she loved him and hold him to her breast, and he would breathe harshly and reach for her and hold her so tightly she had to tell him to let her go, please. Then he’d go to the bathroom and he’d sit in the shower, and she wouldn’t know what to say to him, how to make it right.

“No,” she said now, sharply. “Not of you, Annie, never. Annie—”

He rested his elbows on the table and buried his head in his hands.

The fresher hummed. The sour flavor had stuck to her lips, too. She didn’t want to eat; she knew it abominable to do when he was like this, when they were both like this, but she was so hungry. It made her eyes hurt, for some reason, that she should be sitting here at nine o’clock at night with the sun down and her husband across the table from her, and he with his fingers covering his eyes and she so famished she felt as if she might faint.

“Annie,” she said. She pressed her hands flat on the table and pushed herself up out of the chair. She said again, “Annie.”

His shoulders rose. His fingers slipped into his hair; his palms were flat over his eyes. The floor was slick, but her slippers found traction. She moved softly to him, and when she was there beside him, Padmé leaned down to put her arm around his shoulder. Her hand slid along his back. The musculature there was tense and hard, like his shoulders. She bent; she turned her head; she kissed the side of his neck, just beneath the corner of his jaw.

“I’m afraid,” she said to that corner, “that we’ll fall apart. That our marriage won’t last. We’ll argue too much, and we’ll call each other names. And if you leave the Jedi, you’ll hold it against me, and if I leave the senate, I’ll hold it against you, and—” Her voice hitched. She finished before she might crack entirely: “And I don’t want to lose you.”

He shuddered under her arm. She leaned back, and his hands were coming down; he was turning to her; he looked up at her. There were bruises under his eyes. They’d been there for so long, for years now. 

“I love you,” he said, “I love you—” He reached for her. His thumb swept the side of her belly; then he’d his hand at her back. “Padmé—”

The chair had little room. Anakin was almost too much for it. Together, they were surely too heavy a load; but the legs held, and the back of the chair held, and so she stayed in his lap. She twined her fingers in his hair. He was unblinking; his jaw had set.

“I will never leave you,” he swore, hot and dark.

“You can’t promise that,” Padmé said, stroking with her thumb the curl wound around her first finger. He’d rough hair, dry; it was coarse against her fingers. “Even you don’t know the future.”

“I know this,” said Anakin, with that absolute faith she’d once found so frightening. 

No one could know the future, she thought; but she wanted it to be true and so she said nothing to correct him. She’d seen a shadow in his eyes, and fleetingly she thought of that tall man in black, and then the memory of that figure in the window had gone. Anakin had kissed her. She sucked in a trembling breath through her nose. His eyelashes dripped down over his eyes, and she could count each of them, long lashes, almost black, not terribly thick. Push him away. That was what she ought to do. Push him away and say, we can’t fix our marriage like this; but they would only argue over whether their marriage even needed fixing. 

His hair was thick around her fingers. Her thumb brushed the far corner of his cheek. I chose this, she thought. Padmé, curled up in his lap, turned her hands to cup his face and straightened her back. His chin rose; he followed her. Now it was Anakin’s mouth beneath hers, Anakin’s hair spilling back from his shoulders, Anakin who clutched at the fabric of her rustic evening dress, dragging creases in it between her shoulder blades. Her palms covered his cheeks; she dug her fingers in his scalp. His mouth fell open, and the hands at her back parted, one pressing hard between her shoulders, the other coursing along the line of her back to palm her rear.

She loved him. She thought of it calmly, without pain or great passion; it was only a truth. She had loved him for years now, and because she loved him she had chosen to marry him, and for love of him she had set caps on her career; she had given up one river’s course for another. Every decision had a consequence.

Beneath her knees, bent at the outside of his thigh, he moved. His legs parted; he slung his arm around her hips, gripping her as he rose to put her on the table. Lightsaber segments scattered. He’d swept them away with a flicking finger. Padmé, pulling out of the kiss, glanced over her shoulder, but he’d only slid the pieces down the table with a force push, not thrown them recklessly about. The little pot of oil had spilled though, and he’d sat her in the small, streaked puddle.

“Anakin,” she said, indignant; then he was kissing her neck from jaw to the sloping base, he was pulling the collar of her dress back to kiss the corner of her clavicle, he was biting that ridge of bone and saying:

“I’ve loved you all my life—my entire life—before I met you, I loved you—”

She swallowed forcefully around the weight in her throat. “You couldn’t have loved me before you met me. You didn’t know me.”

“I think I dreamed about you,” he said, and his lips were soft now where he’d bit at her. “I must have.”

What was she to say to that? It had frightened her before, the certainty with which he loved her; it unsettled her now. Padmé was practical, and she was not very romantic; there were times when she remembered the things they had said to her on Naboo at the lake house and she thought she might die of embarrassment. She knew how to say I love you, and hold me, and stay with me a while, but to ask more—to claim more—made her want to withdraw. Easier instead simply to take his jaw in her hands and lean down and kiss him again.

He said, in the space between one kiss and the next, in a low voice, “When you came into Watto’s shop—I knew I’d seen you before—” 

His eyes, pale and blue, were fixed on her as he said this. That was how he’d looked at her when she’d entered the shop at Master Qui-Gon Jinn’s back, as though he _had_ seen her before. He’d called her an angel and she’d thought that cheeky but sweet from a boy so young, and then he’d told her that one day he would marry her and Padmé had laughed because even at the age of fourteen she had known she would never marry. And perhaps there was something not overwhelming but grounding in being loved like Anakin loved her, as though he loved what she might have been as well as what she had been.

She ran her fingernails along the sharp line of his cheekbone. He’d a gaunt face, hidden under his tanned skin and that thick hair. At certain angles he looked lean and almost cruel. Never cruel, she thought. Not Anakin.

“I love you,” she said, measuring out each word as though it were all she had; and it was all she could give him. Padmé kissed his narrow cheeks, the right first and then the left. His eyes closed again. She bent to kiss his lips, and he was there, waiting for her.

Pregnancy had brought with it a number of changes. Her breasts, for one, when he touched her— She hissed.

Anakin winced and said, “Sorry—I forgot—”

“It’s all right,” she said, and she caught his hand as it left her breast and set it along the side, not at the areola where she was most tender. The soreness had begun early, before she’d even realized she was pregnant, and it had lingered, so sensitive some days that any bodice no matter how loose chafed her and on other days so faint she hardly noticed. He’d been gone so long, she thought; not much of a surprise that he would have forgotten. She wished he hadn’t forgotten.

His mouth was at the underside of her chin, and he kissed her with lips and teeth, nipping her just so. He swept two fingers down the side of her breast, a very light touch that had her drawing in one breath and then another, more shallow and quicker as it bled into a third. His other hand, the prosthetic one, was at her knee, then it was under her dress, then it was sliding very deliberately up her thigh, the metal cold against her skin but warming. The fingers were square, thinly designed, and she ran over with goose-bumps all up her thighs, up her breasts, along her arms; and without intending to do so, Padmé tightened reflexively.

The arousal had proved the most inconvenient change. She’d read it was common, pregnant persons experiencing an increased libido, but reading it and experiencing it were two entirely separate things, and what she had presumed easy to handle had not proved to be so. Distance had exacerbated it, Padmé expected. Natural longing for Anakin and the hormonal shifts pregnancy wrought in her had led to something thoroughly unpleasant to put up with during the day. She hadn’t really found it difficult to want Anakin, not since Naboo, but now—

Padmé brought her legs up and then around him, each resting on a corresponding shoulder. His shoulders bowed as he hitched her legs higher, fitting to her knees. The prosthetic hand gripped her thigh; the smooth joints, sealed, wouldn’t pinch her, but the metal did bite, the thin lengths pushing into her skin as he clutched her. She rolled her lips in; she bit the lower lip; she reached to sweep hair from his brow. But he’d stooped, and she caught the back of his head instead, her fingers grazing the curve of it through his tangled hair. The skirt of her dress cut off just below her knees, but with her legs propped up the hem had slipped down her thighs, and he rucked it even higher with a single careless yank. A seam tore; she heard it. Well, it was only a dress for evenings in. 

He was still dressed, buttoned shirt still buttoned, belt still belted. He’d no need to strip out of his clothes when he dipped his head between her legs and kissed her there: tongue between her folds, his teeth as yet withheld, one hand—metal—unyieldingly strong on her thigh and the other—skin, rough—sliding up to join his tongue. Padmé said his name and crossed her legs at his back and curled over his dark head, and it wasn’t long till, for a time, she’d forgotten the coming inevitabilities, or at least she could pretend to have forgotten them when Anakin nosed the crease at the uppermost juncture of her thigh. His breath was hot there. His lips were slick. She caught his hair in her hands and pulled, drawing him up to her so that he would kiss her with his wet mouth, the taste of her on his lips and his tongue, and his breathing harsh, and his shoulders trembling; and she could hold him and center on him and let everything else go away from her. For a time.

*

Once every two or three weeks Padmé met Ahsoka for lunch or a late breakfast, as if food were the excuse needed to arrange an hour here and there together. They’d common enough history that justification wasn’t necessary. Padmé had first met Ahsoka nearly three years ago, and certainly they weren’t strangers to one another. It wasn’t very long ago that Padmé had collapsed in Ahsoka’s arms, after all. But Ahsoka set the dates, always with Padmé directly and never through C3PO, and whether for fear of interrupting Padmé’s schedule or some other thing related to her leaving the Jedi, Ahsoka exercised great care in scheduling appointments at traditional lunch hours.

At one lunch, in a small café that Padmé frequented, a café near to her residence, Padmé said, “I’d like to see you more often.”

That had been a very bright day, with a great deal of harsh sunlight coming in through the windows. The tinting system was on the fritz, the host had explained with much wringing of his tentacles, and so he’d offered a table in one of the darker rooms in the back, the large ones they reserved for office parties; but Padmé, looking to Ahsoka, had waved him off. They took a little table by the side window, where the sunlight was not so severe, and they might still watch the world outside going about its business.

“I don’t want to get Anakin in trouble,” Ahsoka said. This was not the first time the subject of more regular appointments had come up between them.

“Well, I’m not a Jedi,” said Padmé, “so you can’t get me into trouble. And the Jedi don’t know anything about our—arrangement, so it wouldn’t hurt if we saw each other. You and me.”

Ahsoka had shrugged and taken an over-sized bite of her fried stiki grub; that occupied her so long Padmé couldn’t easily start up again, especially when Ahsoka swallowed and said, “You’re sure the sunlight’s not hurting your eyes?”

She could have pressed her, but Padmé, who had pushed Ahsoka to order anything to eat, reminding the girl that Padmé had a tab at the café that her office paid monthly and so really, it would be more wasteful not to use the credit she’d established, knew from what little Anakin had told her of their conversation that pressing Ahsoka on this might be unwise. So she allowed it to lie, as she allowed many things to lie.

“I like the sunlight,” Padmé said, smiling brightly. “Sometimes when I’m cooped up in the office all day, I think if I don’t get a little sunlight, I’ll start shouting about taxes and then I’ll fire my staff without benefits.”

Ahsoka snorted inelegantly around her food, and Padmé had said, “Oh—drink some water,” and slid the glass closer to Ahsoka. 

Three days after Mon Mothma had approached Padmé with the possibility of a recommendation to vice-chair, Padmé welcomed Ahsoka into her apartment. They had planned on the café again, as it was convenient, but Padmé had woken feeling ill, enormously ill, and haunted by a strange impression of looming disaster; a rootless anxiety that had her throwing up breakfast soon after she’d finished it. The apartment was simpler anyway for the both of them.

Ahsoka had protested the café. Out of guilt, Padmé thought. She didn’t dare presume to understand Ahsoka’s situation personally, but she did remember her sister and how fiercely Sola had rejected their family’s efforts to support her when she struck out on her own in Theed. Sola had wanted to make her own way, to prove she could do so. Padmé suspected Ahsoka wanted to prove the same thing to Anakin, to the Jedi; to her self, most of all. Ahsoka had accepted the café in the end, also with guilt, perhaps at the thought that she had showed weakness in accepting charity. It wasn’t charity, Padmé wanted to say to her; but to directly address the issue was to call attention to it, and she didn’t wish to humiliate Ahsoka further either. So she’d only told Ahsoka the truth, that she wasn’t feeling up to leaving the apartment that dreary, rainy Saturday.

“Are you feeling any better?” Ahsoka asked. She’d come in a red tunic with flowing sleeves that opened dramatically at the wrists; it was at stark odds with the plaid print of her leggings. Discreetly, Padmé had made no notice of this.

“A little,” Padmé said. She gestured for Ahsoka to sit, and Ahsoka plopped down on the sofa next to Padmé.

“Is it contagious?” Ahsoka, unbothered, flopped her sandals off and got her feet up on the cushions. She leaned in. “Are you gonna get me sick?”

“I shall endeavour not to sneeze on you,” Padmé said. “No, it’s only a little virus, and it’s already passing.” She didn’t mention the hovering fear; she didn’t know what to call it. To Padmé, it seemed absurd; she thought to speak of it would make it catastrophically ridiculous.

“Is it—” Ahsoka rolled her shoulders. She looked away and then at Padmé and then away again. “Is the baby okay?”

“He’s fine. Thank you for asking. I spoke with the medical droid this morning,” Padmé clarified, “and I’ve been informed that so long as it isn’t painful, or I don’t notice anything out of the ordinary, then it’s nothing to worry about.”

“Oh. Okay,” Ahsoka said, and her shoulders drooped. “That’s great. Obviously that’s great. That’s definitely better than not being okay.”

Padmé laughed and rang for C3PO. Lunch was light, small sandwiches cut at diagonals, Ahsoka’s laden with thick strips of cured meat and Padmé’s heavy with cheese and the bitter cress found in Naboo’s southern rivers. Import fees for that cress were high, as there was little demand for it in the greater galaxy, but she’d been fortunate to find it in bulk at a large shop in the mid rung. With the way her tastes were changing so rapidly, she expected in a week she’d be done with bitter foods and hungry for tangy rarities, or Hutt dishes, squirming and live. The thought made her stomach turn again, and Padmé set her sandwich down.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Ahsoka asked. She ate like a teenager did, graceless and with crumbs sticking at the corners of her mouth. A teenager, that was, or a soldier. Anakin ate similarly when he was hungry, wolfing food down as quickly as he could manage it, without pausing to note taste or texture or even really what he was eating.

“Yes,” Padmé said, “I’m very sure. I wanted to speak with you about something today, if you have the time.” She reached for her datapad and began scrolling through the files.

Ahsoka, licking grease from her fingers, leaned over to peer at the screen. “What is it? Am I in trouble?”

“Only if you don’t stop spraying crumbs at me,” Padmé needled her.

“Sorry,” Ahsoka said, sinking back into the cushions. She wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand. “I didn’t mean to. So am I in trouble now?”

Padmé made a show of sweeping crumbs off the datapad, crumbs that weren’t really there. Comfortably wedged in the sofa, Ahsoka grinned. 

“No,” Padmé said thoughtfully, “I think you’re all right. But here. Read this for me, would you?”

“Aw, reading!” Ahsoka said. “I hate reading. Reading means tests.”

“No test here. I just want your honest opinion on it,” Padmé said, offering her the datapad.

“What is it?” Ahsoka wriggled out of the thick cushioning. She swapped the rest of her sandwich for the datapad. “Is it a speech? I don’t really have to make a whole lot of speeches, so if you needed an editor…”

Padmé tapped a finger on the pad’s casing. “Just read it and tell me what you think. I don’t need a professional eye; if I did, I have people on staff for that. I just want you to tell me what you think when you’re finished reading.”

“I still don’t think you should be asking _me_ ,” Ahsoka grumbled, but she had a little pleased look as she settled into the sofa’s depths once again. She’d worn sandals but left them at the door, so her feet were bare as she folded her legs and tucked her feet under her backside. Padmé had read something about Togruta and bare feet; she couldn’t remember what it was she’d read, only that she’d read it. 

As Ahsoka read the file Padmé had pulled up and given to her, Padmé nursed the rest of her tea. The cup was still rather warm, and she turned it delicately with only the tips of her fingers so she might study the faint, lace-work pattern baked into it. Something could be said for the soothing power of a predictable course known well, and she’d come to know the pattern on this cup very well indeed over the months. No wine now that she’d the baby, and she was slightly disgusted at how badly she’d missed the wine at first, and all the journals recommended cutting out caf, so she’d given that up too. Tea, water, and juice, that was what she had left, and a substantial selection at that, but they were none of them caf or wine. She ran her thumb around the lip of the cup. The uneasy feeling, of waiting for a stone to fall onto her head, remained. It hadn’t been so intense since she’d decided not to go out to the café today, though it hadn’t gone entirely, but she could lay the blame for that on the waiting, specifically, for Ahsoka to finish reading what Padmé had written.

Halfway through—Padmé, who hadn’t forgotten any of what she’d written, was sure it was then—Ahsoka lowered the datapad; she twisted about on the sofa; she said, “You can’t—”

“Read all of it,” Padmé said. She’d closed her eyes, holding the tea cup to her lips. The fragrance, very strong, of the leaves at the bottom of the cup rose as in a curling fog. “Please. Then I’ll listen to anything you have to say, about this or anything else.”

“But this is—” 

Ahsoka clicked her teeth shut, cutting it off. Padmé hadn’t opened her eyes; she only waited. A rustling sound came. Ahsoka had lifted the datapad again.

What I want, Padmé thought as she tipped the cup to drain the last siltish mouthful of tea, is a strong cup of caf. Black, double strong. No: double strong, with a shot of cream. She walked through the making of it. She’d start the machine; she’d open the cupboard and fetch one of the thick mugs; she’d carry it to the counter and then she’d get the cream from the fresher and—

Next to her, Ahsoka took in a shaky breath. So, she’d finished. Padmé set the cup down in the saucer, unhurried. Then, resting her hands one on top of the other in her lap, she turned at last to face Ahsoka.

“Well?” Padmé asked her.

“You can’t,” Ahsoka said again, and she grabbed at one of her head-tails. She squeezed it; her hand slid down the length of it, worrying as Padmé, when she was perhaps eight or nine, had used to pick at her cuticles before a presentation at school.

Haltingly Ahsoka said, “I don’t need charity.”

“Don’t think of it as charity,” said Padmé, “because that isn’t what I’m offering. This is a job, not a vacation.”

Ahsoka’s mouth flattened. She looked fixedly at the table. Her shoulders were straight, her chin jutting; she’d picked up more than one habit from Anakin, or shared a few of hers with him. 

“You don’t have to—look out for me. I have a job already, and an apartment.”

“You do,” Padmé agreed. “You’ve done remarkably. If I were to give up everything I had now, I don’t know that I could do half as well as you’re doing.”

The girl beside her drew her knees up again, her legs unfolding from beneath her. Her toes, bared, curled. Ahsoka clenched her hands and then forced them out.

“I don’t need any help,” she said.

“Well, I do need help,” said Padmé. “That’s why I’m asking you.”

Ahsoka’s eyes flickered. Sidelong, she glanced at Padmé, who held her gaze. Padmé was calm; she’d practice at serenity. She kept her cuticles clean and her nails even, and every Friday she repainted her thumb nails white, as was the tradition in Asawee, the mountain village where her family lived. A queen could not afford small gestures of weakness. A galactic senator could afford even less.

“In two months I’ll be returning to Naboo,” she told Ahsoka. “I intend to stay there throughout the third trimester, until the baby is born. If I’m able, I’ll remain on Naboo for another few months after. It would be easier if I were to excuse myself entirely from the senate for the rest of the year, but the Republic is in such turmoil I don’t know that I can. At least on Naboo,” she said, “I can more readily control how much of my self the public will see.”

Ahsoka’s hand dropped from her head-tail. She’d turned, slightly, just enough that she nearly faced Padmé.

“You don’t need my help for that.”

“But I do need a new guard, and you have a great deal of experience in combat. As a former Jedi, you have skills no one else on my staff can claim.

“And,” she said, more gently now, “you know why I have to go from Coruscant.”

Padmé reached for Ahsoka’s hand. Ahsoka, looking down at her own lap, let Padmé take her hand.

“If you’re afraid of letting me down, don’t be,” Padmé said. “You’re brave and resourceful, and I’ve never known you to back down from any challenge.”

First one finger bent, then the next, and so Ahsoka returned Padmé’s grip. She looked up from under her thin eyelashes at Padmé.

“You aren’t just doing this,” Ahsoka wanted to know, “because—because Anakin asked you to?”

“I’m asking you this,” Padmé said, “because _I_ want you there with me when I go to Naboo. I know that you’re determined to succeed on your own terms and you don’t want any hand-outs, but this offer isn’t a hand-out. I want you to work for me as a guard. I’m very high-profile, you know. More than a few people wouldn’t mind seeing me dead.” She smiled, to undercut the point. “And future employers will be very impressed with a resume that includes ‘personal guard to Senator Padmé Amidala’ on it.”

Ahsoka flexed her fingers; her grip loosened. She drew her hand back, and Padmé let her go.

“Does—” She still hesitated before saying his name. “Anakin know you’re planning this?”

Padmé’s smile faded. She balled her hand, now empty, on her thigh, and she covered it with her other hand. Striving for lightness, she said, “Anakin still thinks that somehow everything will work out right; that I can stay here on Coruscant and have the baby and no one will wonder who the father is. They’ll wonder anyway, but if we’re apart, maybe they won’t think to question Anakin.”

Tentatively Ahsoka said, “I think that maybe… Master Kenobi, sometimes he worried about Anakin. And you.”

Padmé, lost a moment in the thought of months in deliberate separation from Anakin, snapped to. She felt the mask settling on her face again.

“He never said anything,” Ahsoka said quickly, “not to me, so maybe he doesn’t know or suspect. And he wouldn’t ask even if he did. You know what Master Kenobi’s like. He just worries about things on his own and makes that face—” Ahsoka worked her eyebrows together and made a wide frown, and when she’d done this, she stroked her chin as if she’d a beard.

“Well,” Padmé said, relaxing again, “I’m not inviting Master Kenobi to accompany me to Theed,” but she was thinking: what does he suspect? What does he know? He’d spoken with her before, more than once, to warn her not to dally with Anakin. Always he’d talked as if out of concern that she might misuse some schoolboy crush of Anakin’s. He couldn’t know; they were so careful. Ahsoka suspected, she thought. In argument she thought also, Ahsoka had been Anakin’s padawan. And Obi-Wan had been his master.

Ahsoka brushed her hand across the datapad’s touch screen. It flashed; the file went back to the beginning. She held the datapad flat on her knees, her hands on either side of it. Her fingers curled to embrace the top corners.

“You don’t have to do this for me,” she said.

She had been fourteen when Padmé first met her, fourteen, just shy of fifteen, and very brash. Padmé had joked to Anakin that she wasn’t sure which of them was most likely to wind up in the hospital for doing some silly stunt. Ahsoka was seventeen now. Her legs were gangly; she was, mortifyingly, just taller than Padmé if one counted her horns.

“I don’t,” Padmé said, “but I’d like to. And again, you’d be working, but you’d be working for me, and that means health benefits and a room of your own—a suite when we’re in Theed; there just isn’t much space at the mountain villa. I’ll expect your best every day. I won’t accept any less. The Jedi were soft on you, but I won’t be.”

Ahsoka smiled at the joke; she smiled just enough so her cheek dimpled.

“So,” Padmé said, patting Ahsoka’s knee. “What did you think? Give me your honest answer.”

“It’s very kind,” Ahsoka told her. “Thank you. I’d like to. I’d really, really like to, if you go to Naboo.”

“Thank you,” Padmé said. “And if you change your mind between now and then—”

Her old indignation flashed, and Ahsoka sat up straight as a rail. “No way! I’m not some wishy-washy—politician. When I say I’m going to do something, I do it!”

Padmé gave her a teensy bit to think it over, and sure enough, after just a moment of basking in her surety, Ahsoka’s eyes widened. She blanched; her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh—when I said politician, I meant those other guys in the senate. I didn’t mean you, Senator Amidala.” Deference was awkward on her.

“So we’re back to that now,” said Padmé, and she tapped Ahsoka’s knee with a fingertip to show her there were no hard feelings. “I’ve already told you. Call me Padmé. And I tend to agree with you, but don’t tell Anakin. He’ll take it as a victory.”

“I don’t really pay attention to politics,” Ahsoka ventured. “It’s all just a bunch of old guys talking about stuff they don’t have to deal with.”

Padmé sighed and leaned back against the sofa. Ruefully she smiled at Ahsoka. “You’ve been talking with Anakin again. He thinks the senate should be—” She fluttered her hand, dismissive. “Abolished, I suppose.” It was a purposeful exaggeration; she wasn’t sure by how much. After the chancellor’s death, Anakin had drifted some from his previously hard-line political views, but perhaps that was only because he, like Padmé, had tired of the arguments. And still, she thought, we manage to fight about it. When she’d decided to marry a Jedi, she hadn’t thought she’d be marrying a conservative as well. She didn’t really wish to think of it now.

“Have you seen him lately?” Padmé asked instead. That seemed safer a thing to say than to go spilling out all the silly, mundane troubles of marriage with a man as opinionated as Padmé, though safer for Padmé and not Ahsoka, she realized too late. How extraordinarily selfish a question to ask, for this reason.

Ahsoka shrugged, just one shoulder coming up. Her chin dropped as her shoulder hunched. The thick swells of her head-tails masked her cheeks and her eyes from Padmé, who was still resting in the cushions. Anakin had told Padmé a little of the walk he’d shared with Ahsoka in the gardens those couple months gone; he’d told her enough for her to know that much of the most important things had been said.

“He’d like to see you.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to see him,” Ahsoka said. “And I do see him.”

“Not as often as we see each other,” Padmé guessed, and Ahsoka’s other shoulder rose, so she was like a snapping lizard curling up so as to hide the soft belly.

“I don’t want to get him into trouble,” Ahsoka mumbled. “And it’s really. It’s hard. I guess I thought,” she said slowly, picking her words with as much care as Padmé had ever seen Ahsoka put a thought into words, “that—it would be easier after the first time. And I know he’s not ashamed of me or mad at me for leaving. But it _didn’t_ get any easier.” She was frustrated, Padmé thought, and if Padmé couldn’t truly understand how it was Ahsoka lived, she could understand, very readily, how profoundly upsetting it was to try to change something only for nothing at all to change, or for the changes to be so small and so incremental as to appear useless.

“It _will_ get easier,” said Padmé. She reached again for Ahsoka’s hand, and Ahsoka gave her hand again to Padmé. Lightly, Padmé squeezed Ahsoka’s palm. “Don’t give up. Not on your self, or on Anakin. It will get easier,” she repeated, and she looked for something in Ahsoka that would give her reassurance, something she would recognize.

Ahsoka was very quiet, still as well, and then she sighed and she nodded, and she gave Padmé’s hand a shy squeeze in return.

“Okay,” Ahsoka said. “If you say so.”

“I do,” said Padmé. “And—” With her free hand she tapped the datapad, still perched across Ahsoka’s thighs. “I say you should think about this, and let me know what you’ve decided when you’re ready.”

Ahsoka agreed to this, and they finished their sandwiches, pursuing less meaningful conversation between bites. You could only press someone so far, and Padmé had pushed Ahsoka far enough already. When Ahsoka left, Padmé stacked the plates and put Ahsoka’s glass and her tea cup with its saucer on top of the plates, and she carried them together to the kitchen.

C3PO was there, clucking over one of the cleaning droids, a little square thing that zoomed across floors and sucked up detritus. He startled at Padmé’s approach.

“What happened in here?” she asked.

“Oh, Miss Senator!” C3PO said. His hands came up. “You must allow me to take care of the dishes. You’re in no condition for manual labor, not at this sensitive stage.”

“I’m only four months pregnant,” she laughed. “It’s only a few dishes.” She pursed her lips and arched a brow. “And this is far beneath _you_ , C3PO. What kind of person would make a protocol droid clean up dirty plates?”

“Never mind that,” said C3PO. “Master Anakin has tasked me to look after your every need, and this includes—”

He was on the verge of another lecture, so Padmé set the dishes in the sink, thinking to set them in the washer later, and said, “You haven’t told me what the cleaning droid’s doing in here.”

“Well, it’s the strangest thing,” he said, successfully redirected, “but a mug had fallen out of the cabinet and broke on the floor. Shards everywhere!”

“That is strange,” Padmé said. She touched one of the cabinets in passing. “They’re secured, aren’t they?”

“And,” C3PO said, with the triumph of one who reveled in cleaning up disasters, “a carton of cream burst in the fresher, so I’ve set the cleaning cycle to start in a half hour. I’ll have the fresher emptied before it starts, so don’t worry about a thing, Mistress Senator. I’ll have this mess taken care of shortly.”

“I’m sure the cleaning droids can take care of it,” she said, but she crossed the floor to open the fresher and see.

C3PO was saying, “Yes, but you simply can’t count on them to do what they’re programmed to do. They may be top of the line but that hardly means they’re competent,” and Padmé stared down at the puddle of cream that had pooled at the bottom of the fresher; the shelving in the door was coated in cream. The burst carton, caught on the second shelf on its crumpled side, looked as if it had been squeezed in too large and too strong a hand till it ripped. The creeping feeling she’d carried around for most of the day had left towards the end of her lunch with Ahsoka. Now a different sort of uneasiness nipped at her. Padmé closed the fresher door.

At five o’clock she heard of a nasty airspeeder accident just four blocks away, outside the café. Two persons had died; a third was in critical condition. The café would be closed for the rest of the week until repairs could be completed. How lucky, Padmé thought, that she hadn’t gone. The weather program had set a rainstorm for that evening; it began early, at half past five. Padmé’s skin was cold, cold and running over with a crawling sensation. She kept touching her belly, as if to feel the baby, and then she took her hand away. All the journals said the baby’s movements wouldn’t be felt until the fifth month. 

Rain pattered against the windows. The storm strengthened. The fresher, cleaned, was ready to be restocked, and C3PO, who insisted Padmé leave it to him, took care of that. A smell of cream lingered in Padmé’s nose. A new sort of awareness was coming over her; she couldn’t name it. She retired to her office to work.

*

She’d ash in her mouth. A very long time ago, when she was little more than a toddler, a small forest fire had swept across the top of the mountains, well away from the village. The hardy trees ringing the end of the tree-line had had burned; some collapsed, too brittle to stand. The wind carried their detritus down the mountain side, and the ash had come like a snowfall, silent, flaky. Padmé had cried; she hated the taste so badly. She’d spent most of the next week indoors.

She didn’t know why she’d that taste on her tongue again, that awful burnt, dry taste that made her want to scrub her throat out. The room she was in was very clean, a white room, medically equipped and thus medically antiseptic. The throat she wanted to wash hurt terribly. She didn’t know why it did, any more than she knew how ash had got in her mouth; only that speaking seemed an unpleasant prospect. I’m dreaming, Padmé thought.

A man leaned over her. He held her hand; he clasped it tightly to his breast and clutched at her wrist with his other hand. It was Obi-Wan, and he’d soot in his hair, grit in his eyes; a small burn marked his cheek. You look like a mess, she wanted to say to him; but dream or no, her throat hurt too ferociously. More than her throat hurt, she realized. A ripping pain had taken up in her gut. It swelled; it squeezed. Contractions. She was in labor. I’ve had this nightmare before, she thought, though the particulars had changed. She’d given birth in dreams somewhat regularly early on, but never like this with Obi-Wan bent over her and fire in her mouth.

“Don’t give up, Padmé,” Obi-Wan was saying to her; he begged it.

“I’m only dreaming,” she said. She tried to say it. Her lips parted. Her mouth opened. The tongue in her mouth moved, the muscle suddenly made a foreign thing that worked against her. What she did say was: “It’s a girl. Anakin thinks it’s a girl,” in a hoarse voice.

Obi-Wan’s eyes were wet. She wanted to recoil, but whatever else was in her body wouldn’t let her. Not the baby. This is just a dream, she shouted; but nothing at all came out but a broken gasp from the mouth of the woman whose body she was in.

“We don’t know yet,” he told her. “In a minute—you have to stay with us.”

“If it’s a girl,” said the woman, and she broke off, agonized; her head fell back as she groaned. The room was so very white, so clean, and the only interruption of this whiteness was the ash smeared across Obi-Wan’s brow and the thing in his eyes.

It isn’t real, Padmé thought. It isn’t real. It isn’t real. She was a child again, sinking under the covers to hide from a shadow, a luxury she hadn’t allowed her self for decades. This is a dream, she thought clearly. She always knew dreams for what they were, and she knew this to be a dream; it had to be; it couldn’t be anything but. A medical tent had been set up over her legs. Behind that length of glossy plastic, a surgical droid worked; it worked to take the baby from her. She thought, _Stop_ , it can’t live outside of me yet, it’s only been four months— She could not see her belly for the tent.

“This isn’t real!” she shouted, and no one heard her. The room had gone; Obi-Wan had gone; it was all gone. 

She had an impression, faintly, of floating. As across a great distance Padmé saw her self as a child, and her sister Sola barely more than that, as they laid together, side by side, on a raft buoyed down a mountain stream. Their hair had mingled, Padmé’s curls with Sola’s straighter, thinner locks. Those two girls, out on the water, laughed, and they bent their heads together to share a joke. It was like that, now, as she drifted, but she had no one else with her at all, not Sola, not Obi-Wan with his sad eyes, and the baby too young. 

Like a stream, and unlike a stream: she flowed along in a vast absence, and as she flowed, parts of Padmé broke away, like a stone worn down by a river. She was a senator, then a queen, then a princess of Theed, then only Padmé and then not even that. Fear came, outrage; they slipped from her too. A girl floated down a cold mountain stream in early spring with her older sister beside her, their fingers laced and their thumb nails painted white, and she didn’t know the girl’s name or the sister’s but she knew she loved them both like she loved the stream, swollen with melted ice. And there was a boy far away, in a desert that never ended, a small boy with a round face and old, worn-out eyes and a mother. She had a little piece of carved wood on a leather string from that boy. For luck. So she wouldn’t forget.

In an eddy in that great river that pulled her along—in another place and another time and another Padmé—she placed that bit of wood into Obi-Wan’s hand and said, “There is still good in him. I know there is.”

A shadow washed over her. The world reformed, and it was burning; it was all burning. Ash in the air, ash on her tongue, and everything around her was fire. His name was Anakin, she thought. She remembered that now, as he stood before her with his face contorted and his eyes like venom and his hand reaching for her as Mustafar, volcanic and restless, spat and burnt at his back. The nearness of the eruption did not concern her. The earth shuddered under her feet. She shuddered with it.

“I loved you too much to see you!” he snarled at her. “To see what you are!”

His fingers were crooking. Her throat locked. Padmé. She was Padmé. This isn’t real, she thought again, and then she began to choke. A spot burst behind her eye; another joined the first and then a third, and then a riot of fireworks as the shadow closed around her. She staggered and fell to one knee and then she knew if she didn’t turn her body—if she didn’t brace—she’d land on her front; she’d land on the baby, and Anakin—

Padmé lurched awake. She lunged upright; she swayed a moment, disoriented: the world was dark; she smelled sweat; her throat was a little dry but it didn’t hurt. The sweat was her own, the stink of it pervasive, intimate, and stomach-turning. She’d sweated through her nightgown and dampened the sheet beneath her. The undersides of her breasts were sticky with it. Someone beside her stirred and mumbled her name as a question. Anakin. This was her bedroom. This was their bedroom, in their apartment, and she’d had a very bad dream, that was all. The aircon murmured. Her bare arms, faintly damp, pricked with the light air current. Then Anakin, rising in bed beside her, touched her arm near to her shoulder. His palm slid down the length of her upper arm, reassuring.

“Padmé?”

Something brushed at her, something entirely incorporeal and inside her. His fingers encircled her elbow. Her husband said, “You had a bad dream,” as if to test her, and his hand was wrapped around her elbow; he was holding her there.

A clammy sort of chill ran up her back. Her gorge rose. Padmé said, “I have to—” and knew if she said another word she would throw up in the sheets. He let her go and she stumbled out of bed. She didn’t think she would make it to the bathroom in time, but she managed the six quick steps across the floor. Her chest clenched. Kneeling at the toilet, she vomited. Another spasm, a third. She’d last eaten hours before and thus very little came up, but she kept trying and trying, unable, for a time, to stop. Very early on in the pregnancy she had learned that vomiting meant crying, too, and a running nose. Anakin was behind her, his arm around her shoulders, a hand pulling the hair back from her face as she rested her forehead on the edge of the toilet bowl and tried, and failed, to stop the next retch.

“I’m sorry,” she rasped. Her nose was dripping. She fumbled, blindly, for the paper, and Anakin ripped off a square and leaned forward to wipe her nose for her. “You don’t have to—” She closed her eyes tightly and held her breath. The tightness passed. Ragged, she breathed in.

“It’s all right,” Anakin said. He threw the crumpled square into the toilet and reached to flush it. “I’ve cleaned worse.”

Padmé pushed up off the toilet and then—wavering—she set her elbow on the rim and laid her brow against the back of her hand and breathed, just breathed, through her mouth rather than her overflowing nose. He handed her another square of paper and she cleaned her nose, spat into the center to get rid of the slickness in her mouth, folded the paper up, and threw it down the toilet; a rote system now for her. 

“Would you please get me a cup of crushed ice?” she asked him, her head still propped on her hand. “No water, just the ice.”

Anakin stroked her hair, drawing a strand from the corner of her mouth where it had caught and, no doubt, gotten dirtied, and kissed her temple, and then he went to get her the ice. In the silence of the bathroom, Padmé turned her hand over and covered her eyes with her fingers. The acid-sour flavor of sick stung her lips. Her hand was trembling, so she set it down in her lap, where she could hide that small tremor in the thin folds of her nightgown. Her throat scraped as she swallowed. Convulsively she swallowed again, and she was careful not to reach up and touch her neck to see if she might feel the bruises that weren’t there. Padmé knotted her fingers in her gown. Leaning over the toilet, she spat twice more.

He was back with a small glass, half-filled with ice, crushed as she’d requested, and a robe inelegantly bundled in the crook of his arm. The glass he gave to her. The robe, he shook out as she fished a piece of ice from the glass and popped it in her mouth. Anakin crouched next to her and, business-like, he got the robe around her shoulders. Business-like, she got her arms through the sleeves, though she had to switch the glass from one hand to the other to do so. The jagged edge of the ice blunted then softened as she sucked on it. He would ask her if she was all right, in just a minute.

“I’m fine,” she said before he could ask her. “It was only a dream.” Surely if she told her self it enough times, it would stick.

The tips of his fingers just brushed her shoulder. This time she didn’t pull away from his hand as it closed around her arm, and Anakin, rubbing a circle through the sleeve on her arm, settled onto the floor beside her. His hand migrated to her back, between her shoulder blades, where he continued to pet her, flat-palmed, in another circle that went on and on.

Padmé ate the ice, two chips now rather than one, and crunched between her molars rather than sucked till it melted all away. Her chest throbbed, bruised she supposed by the force with which she’d thrown up everything she could. The pain from the dream, the tearing pain in her belly, hadn’t carried over into the waking world. She expected it would fade soon, the memory of how it had felt as the droid’s long and dexterous metal fingers worked inside her, cutting through flesh and parting tissue, and yet she recalled it intensely, as though it had truly happened, if not to her then to some other woman. Her gut was churning again. A slow, steady breath settled that.

Anakin bent to kiss her shoulder, though with the robe on she couldn’t feel his lips or his breath against her. The layer of cloth between his mouth and her shoulder, and his hand and her back, was a gulf. His thumb crooked, curling to press her arm.

Haltingly he said, “Would you tell me? What it was. Your dream.”

It was the question she asked him when he woke, breathing hard and clutching at the sheets, in the early hours of the morning; he never answered.

“It’s nothing,” she said.

He ran his hand down her back. “It isn’t. You were—” He hesitated. A muscle in his jaw ticked, and he ducked his head, averting his gaze from her cheek to her shoulder. “Never mind.”

She sighed and raked her finger across her brow, pushing the curls back from her eyes. She was weary, that’s what she was, weary and wanting not to talk of it, to go back to bed and pretend nothing had happened; nothing _had_ happened. Just a nightmare.

“What is it?” she asked him, and she said, “Annie,” to soften it.

His throat worked. Lowly he said, “I thought that—I felt that—you were reaching out to me.”

“That isn’t uncommon,” she said. She smiled, tiredly. “I’ve kicked you before. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

Anakin was shaking his head, a tense motion, carefully restrained. “Not that way. And your feet are too tiny to hurt.”

“Not to hear you yelp,” she said, and like that, something in her began to uncoil, and she thought yes, it really had just been a dream. She was only four months along, and they were sitting together in their bathroom which was as unlike a sterile medroom as a bathroom could be from the blue tiles to the arching skylight to spots on the toilet’s rim where she needed to clean away the specks her sickness had left; and Anakin’s hand was a warm and bracing weight between her shoulders, not a weapon stretched out at her. 

He stroked her again, tracing the curvature of her spine as she sat there, bent forward over the toilet. She’d been knobby once, down her back, but one by one the vertebrae had been obscured by a thin layer of fat, just as her breasts had swelled, the well-known landscape of her body changing in little ways every day, so quietly she hardly noticed them. Anakin, who was gone for such long weeks as the war demanded, noticed them all, and in between the strange silences of their marriage, the simultaneous distances and powerful intimacies, it was a comfort for him to marvel at her every change, to want to trace her softening jaw with his fingers and then kiss it. He touched her like that now, his hand wandering the expanse of her back.

“I felt you,” he said, almost absently. “In the force, I felt you. Not just you, alive, but you, as if you were…”

Again she felt it, a curious and alien brush inside her, as if a mountain spirit were running its fingers through her. Under his hand, Padmé was arrested. The sensation was unlike anything she’d felt before, and it was—invasive, horribly so, as if the bounds of her flesh had flaked away and she was bare, truly bare, everything that made her Padmé stripped from her. She set the glass of crushed ice down on the tiles beside the toilet.

“That isn’t possible,” she said. “I’m not force sensitive, so it isn’t—I couldn’t do something like that.” As she said it, she remembered the cream dripping down the shelves in the fresher, and the solemn face of the reporter at the café, the airspeeder still crumpled along the wall behind him; and the shadowed man with the helmet like a skull in her office, the one who had showed in the window and looked at her as if she were the delusion and not him, and how Padmé had known him without recognizing him.

“Ahsoka felt the baby.” She was staring at the wall, papered lightly blue to contrast with the dark tones of the tiled floor. “That’s how she knew. She felt it in the force, and she thought it was you… Is that possible? That I could—” 

Padmé turned on him. He was close to her, very close, his head inclined and his ear to her. Saying it out loud, she felt it absurd. She’d lived all her life without so much as a single unfounded premonition; she prided her self on conclusions made on logic, known facts, and probable outcomes, and decisions based in rationality and good emotion, rather than an ill-formed instinct or a—a bad dream.

“If the baby is sensitive,” she said, “if he has a high midichlorian count already—”

“She,” said Anakin, and Padmé, startled, looked at him. His eyes were fixed at a point in the air above her head; he looked as if he were deep in thought. “The baby’s a girl. I can feel her.”

She thought of—she remembered—the her in the dream saying, “Anakin thinks it’s a girl.”

“There’s no way to know that,” she said, “not without testing—” And of course, simply because a baby was called a boy or a girl at birth didn’t mean that’s what they were--

“I’m sure,” Anakin said firmly, and he looked down at her and smiled. The brightness of it struck her: he was happy in a way she hadn’t seen him in months. His eyes crinkled. He touched Padmé’s arm. “I feel her. She’s strong, like you. I’m sure of her,” he said again.

Wondering, Padmé cupped her belly between her hands. “The baby isn’t even moving yet. How…”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. Just as quickly as it had come and transformed him, the smile faded; he frowned. “The Jedi don’t have many children. Master Ki-Adi-Mundi had seven daughters, but the order didn’t take any of them.”

She traced the burgeoning roundness of her self, the cradle where the baby was still, at least to her understanding of it. You’re alive, she thought; and the thought was so sudden and so overwhelming, she pushed it away. Of course the baby was alive; there was no reason to be so surprised by it, and yet she supposed that she hadn’t realized, somehow, between all the planning she’d done for how to carry and deliver the child, that it _was_ a child now, that the slow formation of a heart and a brain and lungs meant that there was a heart, and a brain, and lungs, and they were all part of a child, her child.

“I was going to meet Ahsoka at the café.” Rationally, she worked through it. “But when I woke up this morning, I had the worst feeling, like something terrible was going to happen. We had lunch here instead. 

“There was an accident at a quarter to one, when we would have been leaving the café. An airspeeder crashed into the front of it. I sit at the corner table,” she said, “where I can see the sun in the early afternoon. That’s where it was.”

Anakin’s hand tightened about her arm, tighter, tighter. His expression was as tightly gathered, and she thought, but I’m all right, you see, so there’s nothing to be worried about; but she was thinking, too, of the mug cracked apart on the kitchen floor. She ushered calmness.

“I’m all right, Annie,” she said. Then—pausing just briefly—she asked, “When she was pregnant with you, did your mother—sense things?” It was cruel to probe; she had to ask. Simply because it might hurt him didn’t mean she could afford to leave it untouched.

His grip loosened. She thought perhaps he might let her go, but he held on to her, though only very lightly.

“She never said anything to me about it. She might have,” he said. “She didn’t tell me.”

The tips of his fingers had settled at Padmé’s elbow. 

“Is this what it’s like for you?” Padmé asked him. “To see things, and feel them, even when you don’t want to?”

“The Jedi are trained to control it,” he said. “There are some meditation exercises I could teach you that might help, the basic things every padawan learns. Or—” He let go of her entirely. “I know who to speak with about this.”

Her voice rose, sharp. “You can’t go to Master Ki-Adi-Mundi—”

“Not him,” Anakin said, standing. He held his hand out to her to help her up. “Djinn Altis allows his students to marry and have families. If anyone would know, he would, and he doesn’t answer to the council. He suspected I was involved with someone, though he didn’t know it was you. I didn’t tell him.”

“And what am I to do?” Padmé demanded, still holding on to his hand as they stood together. She grasped his arm with her other hand. “Wait here and hope that I don’t start talking to strangers in the mirror?”

Anakin looked at her, puzzled. She hadn’t told him of the shadow man; she hadn’t thought she needed to, and the nagging familiarity of that apparition, the slope of his shoulders and how he turned his head in so precise a way, had held her tongue for her.

“Ahsoka can teach you the exercises as well as I can. She has a knack for demonstrating things.” An edge came over him. “It shouldn’t be difficult to set up. She already prefers seeing you.”

“And when you’re visiting with Ahsoka,” Padmé said, “are you angry at her for seeing me more often than you see me?”

He colored. She touched his cheek, deeply tanned and now lightly red under that.

“Oh, Annie,” she said, and she moved her hand so she might kiss him where she’d set her fingers first. “Sometimes I don’t think you’ve grown up at all.”

“I hate this damned _war_ ,” he said rather than protesting. “I’m sick of being out there, fighting for the bureaucrats—”

“It’s nearly over,” Padmé said. “We just have to be patient.”

Anakin breathed in harshly through his nose and then let it out, all of it, in a hard sigh.

“I’ll speak with Djinn Altis,” he said at last.

A part of her, a little part that was selfish and thoroughly as un-grown-up as she’d accused Anakin of being a moment ago, wanted to say, Now? Do you have to go now? But you’ve only just got home again. That wouldn’t help either of them, to ask him to stay with her, so once more she let him go. Her hand slipped from his jaw.

“And I’ll call Ahsoka,” Padmé said. “If you could learn to meditate, it shouldn’t be too difficult for me.”

His brow knit, just a line between his eyes. She wondered if perhaps he had wanted her to plead for him to stay, to wait another day or two with her before he set out to find Master Altis. What was it, to sacrifice one more thing for a greater good? They would survive. They had survived thus far.

“I need to clean up in here,” she said. “Go back to bed, Anakin.”

“I’ll get a droid to take care of it,” he said, stretching his palm out to her. “Come with me to bed. Please.”

His fingers curled, very slightly. Not reaching, but offering. She took his hand in her own and together they went back to bed, Padmé in her nightgown and the robe, and Anakin with his rough fingers woven gently between hers. In the morning. In the morning, he would go. She had much to do at the office, and of course the war, even as in its death throes, demanded attention, and she would have to check with Ahsoka to see when they might meet again. Soon, Padmé thought. Ahsoka was growing more comfortable by the week, adjusting to life outside the Jedi Order.

In bed, Anakin fussed over Padmé. He pulled the sweat-damp sheet from the mattress and brought a fresh blanket from the linens closet. Together they curled up in bed, Anakin at Padmé’s back, his flesh hand resting just beneath her breasts and his prosthetic fingers untangling her hair. She covered his hand on her belly with both of hers, and he parted her hair, drawing it back from her nape that he might kiss the back of her neck once high, twice lower, a third time nearly at her back, where the robe and her nightgown dipped. He was warm around her, just the nearness of him enough. Tomorrow night she would sleep alone again. She closed her eyes and turned her face down to the pillow, and breathing evenly she waited for either sleep or dawn to come.


	4. Interlude.

As Ahsoka had asked, Padmé met her on what Padmé thought of as neutral ground, any place outside of the apartment Padmé and Anakin shared but on this occasion, specifically, a cheap diner in the mid- near bottom-rungs of Twelfth Sector. So far down from the sky rungs and away from windows, sequestered as the diner was inside the catacomb guts of a multi-purpose starscraper, the place was poorly lit and peopled entirely with patrons, most of them human, who’d no interest in being recognized or recognizing anyone else. Padmé seated her self at a booth in a dark corner and kept her voluminous hood up; anyone who did wish to see her face would have to do so at very close range. Discretion had rarely proved unwise.

Smoke weighed heavily throughout the room. The stink of cigarettes, yes, and the usual legal vices proliferated, but a man at the far corner of the bar had a tapered, lighted stick balanced between two fingers and a tell-tale stream of faintly violet smoke drifted from between his lips: spice. Padmé averted her gaze. The table was coated in a basic polymer that resisted damage and simplified cleaning. It certainly appeared clean in the limited light. Slipping her hand up her sleeve, she wiped the edge with her swaddled forearm before she dared fold her hands on top of it. Her skin hardly stuck at all. Such high standards, she thought. It wasn’t the first dive she’d gone to, but she didn’t see a reason to enjoy the experience.

Ahsoka showed up shortly after Padmé, just as a fight began at the bar. Through the haze, Padmé spotted Ahsoka, distinctive amidst the humans with her arching montrals and her masking pattern, that white on her brow and cheeks. Padmé thought of signaling her with a raised hand, but as Padmé had spotted Ahsoka, Ahsoka spotted her in turn. Nimbly Ahsoka side-stepped the growing brawl and made her way through the likewise growing crowd of spectators to the corner booth.

“You didn’t have a hard time finding the place, did you?” Ahsoka asked her. She’d a uniform on, a rumpled shirt with _Quik-n-Flick Courier Service_ pasted across the right breast and each short sleeve.

A man, grabbing another by the lapel, rammed him into the bar. Ahsoka craned to see.

“Yeesh. What are those dumb-dumbs doing?”

“I believe,” Padmé said delicately, “they were debating the tab.”

“Well, they’re gonna have a lot more to pay for,” Ahsoka said. She jerked her thumb at the door. “You want to go now?”

Very much so, though she’d tact enough not to admit it. Rather, Padmé gestured to the electronic menu set in the table and asked, “Didn’t you want to eat?”

“I have food at my apartment.” Ahsoka smiled at Padmé, in a way that had her blue eyes lidding and the eyebrow-ish markings on her brow wrinkling as if to laugh. “Besides I think if you’re here any longer you’re probably going to jump out of your skin.”

The wretched lighting and the shadows her hood threw hid Padmé’s flush. How enormously strange, she thought, to be teased and seen through so easily by a girl so much younger than her. As Padmé followed Ahsoka out of the diner, a task that necessitated a long detour around the mess at the bar, she brushed folds out of her cloak. At the tram that would take them from the diner to the commuter’s stop on the far end of the floor, she’d regained her dignity.

“The salad selection looked enticing,” Padmé said.

“It’s not,” Ahsoka said, and she gave Padmé another one of those laughing smiles. “Look—I know you don’t want me to feel bad or whatever—but you’re way too high maintenance for a place like that. I could feel how weirded out you were from halfway across Coruscant.”

Padmé flushed again. Stiffly she said, “Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not at all judging—”

“Don’t worry about it.” Ahsoka waved her toward the arriving transit shuttle, advertising a run of _Fivit Square—Shzij—Cruml Zet._ “You’re not used to my kind of hang-outs. They’re nice people, mostly,” she said over her shoulder as they boarded. “Like everybody else, wherever. No one’s gonna make you smoke spice if you don’t want it.”

The shuttle was in passable condition, with an engine that made guttering sounds and upholstered seats, some of which had been partially de-upholstered by years of wear and vandalism. Padmé followed Ahsoka to a pair of seats in the back row, where they could sit alone. Ahsoka took the chair nearest to the grimy window and propped her knees up against the seat in the next row up. Sandals again, Padmé noted. She’d sewn small, woven thread flowers onto the straps around her ankles. Padmé rested her hands in her lap. Her sleeves masked them; she kept them still.

“You didn’t bring C3PO?”

Padmé smiled fleetingly. “He wasn’t very happy with me for that. But it would have been trickier to go unnoticed if he accompanied me.”

“What if someone does recognize you?” Ahsoka asked her. “I mean, you _are_ kind of a big shot senator.”

“This isn’t the first time I’ve had to indulge in subterfuge,” Padmé said. “And anyway, you’re here. Surely a young force user as skilled as you can protect me.”

Ahsoka made a grumbling noise and looked away to the window, but the stripes of her head tails had darkened just so, the Togruta equivalent of a blush. Absently Ahsoka scratched the side of her nose.

“It’s only eight stops from here,” she said after they’d left the first stop after the diner. “Then we have to walk a block and go down a level, and we’re there.”

The engine coughed, and the shuttle shuddered just once before the grav-stabilizers kicked back on. Padmé, with nothing else to hold on to, squeezed her hands. Subterfuge or not, she would have preferred to take a cab to Ahsoka’s address, and let them speculate as to why Senator Amidala met so often with Ahsoka Tano, formerly of the Jedi. They were friends; they’d worked together during the war on several missions; she had every right to hire a cab to see Ahsoka. Padmé rolled her tongue against her hard palate.

“Why didn’t you want to meet at your apartment?”

“It was really messy,” Ahsoka said to the window. “Plus I figured if you were going to come down here, I should probably escort you part of the way, since you are a senator and everything.”

“We could have had lunch at my apartment,” Padmé suggested, as she had before.

Ahsoka was shaking her head as Padmé finished. “Nope,” she said. “You need to do this some place quiet, so you can relax. That means—” She ticked them off her fingers. “No private line to the senate ringing ‘cause some old guy forgot how to read, and no getting drinks out of the fresher for me, and definitely no Threepio.”

Looking around the cramped shuttle and, briefly, out the opposing window at the sooty edifices of the mid-rung’s street-fronts, Padmé wondered how she could relax here more than she would in her own apartment. It was an ugly thought and she knew it was ugly as soon as it came to her, and she turned her attention to her hands, clasped in her lap. The hood swallowed her. 

She’d known, of course, that poverty was rampant throughout Coruscant, that spice remained a significant problem even here at the heart of the Inner Rim, far from the gangsters and smugglers that controlled the Outer Rim and its associated territories. She had supported legislation to provide cost of living adjustments; she had argued in favor of weakening punitive measures for drug use while strengthening the response to selling spice; she had never before gone further down than the second level of the mid-rung in any sector.

The series of apartments where Ahsoka lived were situated on two expansive floors of one of the newer starscrapers. The halls were clean, the doors likewise, and aside from Ahsoka and Padmé, it seemed as if no one else was about. 

“Lot of us have to work double shifts,” Ahsoka explained. She punched in the passcode for her apartment and they waited together for the system to process it. “So when you’re not working you just want to go home and sleep until you have to go work again. The guy next door snores all _day_.”

“That sounds—” Padmé cast for a word strong enough. She settled for an emphatic “Awful.”

Ahsoka shrugged and the door hissed open, sliding into the wall. “It’s not like it’s a cargo hold of star candies, but it pays rent.” That was another bewildering thing, to hear Ahsoka talking of rent and jobs. 

Padmé stepped into the apartment and stopped, just in the small room. She’d expected something like what Sola’s room had looked like in Theed, when both Padmé and Sola still lived with their parents: a teenager’s mess, clothes everywhere, too many knick-knacks, a holo-poster or four on the wall. Instead Ahsoka’s room was plain and bare but for a low table in the center with a simple flash-cooker plugged into it on the side, a cot along the right wall, and, pegged on to the back wall, a half-full clothes rack with a pair of worn boots and another pair of sandals beneath. Another door was on the left wall; that was it.

“If you need to, um—” Ahsoka flicked her hand down and up again. “Freshen up, the bathroom’s over there.” She pointed to that door.

Padmé pulled her hood back, very slowly. The room remained as stark without the hood to limit her sight. Ascetic. That was the word for it. She turned on her heel, looking to the ceiling, equally as bare, and the wall behind her. It was a clean room, very white, well-tended. The sheet on the cot was brown, the corners precisely made and the top of it turned down three even inches.

“How long have you lived here?” Padmé asked.

“Um—” Ahsoka wrinkled her nose. “Two months?” She rubbed at her arm, her elbow turned out and the back of her hand at her thigh. “It’s not as nice to look at as your place, but, you know. A Jedi wants not for things of the world and blah blah blah. I like it. It’s easy to think in here, when Riz isn’t snoring. And I can clean it real quick too.”

She’d been joking, then, when she’d said the apartment was messy. Padmé had thought it a jest, but the sort with a foundation in truth: self-deprecating, rather than humorous because it was so untrue. Anakin lived similarly: few necessities, fewer possessions. He’d three outfits, and two of those outfits shared a pair of trousers; he only owned the one pair of shoes, dark boots she’d given him to celebrate his passage from padawan to knight and those she had all but forced on him. His ears had reddened and he’d smiled, pleased, when he finally accepted them. She’d nearly been ready to throw them at his head. 

Still, to live in a place so devoid of decoration or the little defining touches that showed it was one’s own— At home in Asawee, Jobal Naberrie made tiny dolls out of grass, one for each member of the family, and hung them in the window box over the kitchen sink, a tradition Sola continued at her house in Theed. In two houses on Naboo, a grass doll of Padmé turned in a window, and on Coruscant in her apartment, Padmé had begun to think of dolls made out of thread, a sort of metropolitan update on the tradition; a doll each for her mother and her father and her sister, and her husband and their child. 

Ahsoka was digging in a little drawer set into the table, and Padmé, shucking her cloak and folding it over her arm, crossed to join her at the center of the small room. Wasn’t it true that Ahsoka had her own traditions, given to her by the Jedi? Padmé saw an absence in the room; perhaps Ahsoka saw home.

“I can hang your cloak up—”

“I’m not that far along,” Padmé scoffed, and she went to hang her cloak on the clothing rack. Most of the garments there were simple, all brightly colored and with youthful cuts, shaped to the trends from last season. Ahsoka had another of the courier’s outfits in a dry-cleaning bag, positioned by itself at the end of the rack. Padmé smoothed her cloak and left it there beside the bagged shirt and trousers.

At the table, Ahsoka had set up two cushions, pulled out from beneath the table, on either side so they would face each other. On top of the table, she’d placed two mugs, one large and white at Padmé’s place, the other smaller, red, and artistically lumpy all over. The design was familiar but Padmé couldn’t place it. As she sat, mindful of her belly, she gestured to Ahsoka’s red mug and said, “That design—”

“Oh,” Ahsoka said. She fiddled with the handle, a spiraling thing that connected at the bottom of the mug and not the top. “Um—from Gefferet, on Shili.”

“Ah,” said Padmé. A Togruta design. Another tradition. “I’m usually the one offering drinks—what would you like?”

“No, no! I’ve got it!” Ahsoka clapped her hand on top of the white mug. “I don’t have a lot of choices, but you like tea, right? Is berit okay?”

Padmé smiled at her and withdrew her hands from the mug. “Berit tea would be lovely.”

Ahsoka turned to fuss with the little cooker; there was a drink dispenser on the side of it, Padmé saw. How clever, she thought with some surprise, to fit the two together. Economical: no doubt it cut down on energy costs while also saving space. She’d no lack of space, with how empty the apartment was, but still, Ahsoka’s make-shift kitchen was efficient.

The drinks ready, Ahsoka’s hot milk steaming and Padmé’s cool, as berit tea was usually served, Ahsoka settled back on her own cushion and said, shyly, “Is it good?”

The tea was sharper than she liked it, with an odd, dusty under-taste. “Delicious,” Padmé said, smiling again over the mug before taking another sip.

Ahsoka relaxed, her shoulders sloping. “Good. Sometimes the machine gets all—fritzy.” She set her mug down. Her long fingers cradled it. Then her shoulders squared again and she looked evenly at Padmé across the table. “Skyguy said I needed to teach you some meditation techniques but he didn’t say anything else. Just all ‘get to it, Ahsoka.’ So do you want to tell me what it’s about?”

Her instinct was to downplay it. Too many secrets, she thought; now here she meant to keep another from one of the very few people who knew her most devastating secrets. Padmé breathed in deeply and then she let it out in a long, steady sigh.

“I’ve been seeing things,” she said, very calmly, “since the end of the first trimester. Sometimes it isn’t something I see, but something I feel very strongly. The day we were supposed to eat at the café but I was too sick to go out—there was an accident at the café that afternoon. We would have sat at the table where the airspeeder crashed.” Her pulse strengthened in her throat, and consciously Padmé ignored it. “Anakin believes they’re force visions. That it’s a symptom of the pregnancy.”

Ahsoka sucked on her lip. “Huh,” she said. Her eyes flicked up. “I guess that makes sense. I’ve never heard of it _not_ happening. I did sense the pregnancy, so if there’s enough midichlorians… And you’re connected, right, biologically?”

Padmé cupped the mug; her hands tightened about it. 

“Do you know,” she said lightly, “I hoped that you would say it was all nonsense and Anakin was only worrying over nothing.”

“You don’t have to be afraid of it,” Ahsoka said, tipping her head. “The force is a good thing. Or it can be, if you know what you’re doing with it.”

“And of course that’s why I’m here,” Padmé said, and she smiled again. This time, she knew, Ahsoka could see it was false. “Anakin’s off—”

“On some secret mission that you probably shouldn’t tell me about.” Ahsoka grinned ruefully. “I wouldn’t be my first choice either. I only got as far as learner before they kicked me out.”

“And I haven’t been in school since I was ten or so,” Padmé said, “so we’re very well-matched.”

Ahsoka giggled, and Padmé, ducking her head, laughed softly too. Companionably, they worked on their respective drinks. Padmé thought of perhaps asking Ahsoka if she’d come to a decision yet regarding Padmé’s proposal; then she thought, perhaps another time. When Padmé had finished the tea, Ahsoka offered her something to eat; methr soup, or something from a local delivery joint.

Padmé shook her head. “I’d rather get started.”

So Ahsoka turned her mug over and let the rest of the milk pour out. Padmé drew back but Ahsoka ran her finger along the outside of the spreading pool, and the liquid ran after her finger. A trick, like the ones Anakin had used to show Padmé when he’d still thought he needed to impress her. The milk coursed in a twining route, branching out long, thin fingers that in turn splintered and ran on.

“Master Plo Koon said, the force is a stream,” Ahsoka told her. “It’s always making new channels for itself, and if you’re not careful it can pull you along with it. You don’t control the force but redirect it, like when you dam a river.” She laid her finger down on top of one of the first off-shoots, and the splitting arm of that little river lapsed into a puddle, its borders no longer defined. “What _you_ have to do is shore up the banks, so it doesn’t keep overflowing.”

“That doesn’t sound too hard,” Padmé said, knowing it was what Ahsoka needed her to say to continue.

“It’d be easier if you grew up at the Jedi Temple.” Resting her chin on her palm, Ahsoka sighed. “We learn this stuff when we’re just kids, ‘cause otherwise it can get really—”

“Overwhelming,” Padmé finished dryly.

Ahsoka straightened up, looking sheepish as she dropped her hand. She snagged a towel out of another of the table’s small drawers and began mopping up the milk, pooling together again.

“So, uh, we’ll start with some meditation exercises so you can clear your head.”

“No scented candles?” Padmé glanced about as she teased Ahsoka. “No soothing background music or sounds of nature?”

Ahsoka flipped the towel toward the bathroom door, and the door flicked open in time for the towel to splat in the sink. The throw would have been more impressive if Anakin hadn’t tried to wow Padmé with a similar move on their brief honeymoon; she’d laughed at him instead of cooing appropriately over his mastery of the force. 

Matter of fact, Ahsoka said, “They’re distractions. You don’t need candles or music or singing birds to get close to the force. It’s already inside you; it’s just that now you’re finally noticing it.”

“I’d like to not notice it.” Another joke, that was how she meant it. That was how it sounded, but Padmé knew, even if Ahsoka did not, that it was true. Anakin might revel in the force, and Ahsoka still found purpose in the connection, but Padmé had lived all her life without it and now here it was twisting her dreams, haunting her when she was awake, brushing at her like the hand of a ghost. Yet underneath that, it was the thought that she had been a whole person without the force.

“You can’t,” said Ahsoka, without laughing at Padmé. “But you can learn how to understand it.”

Padmé breathed evenly. She was still a whole person; she would remain whole even if she grew inured to the force again once the baby was born. This had not changed her. It would not change her.

“Do you want to start?” Ahsoka asked her.

“Yes,” said Padmé.


	5. Four Months. (2)

Djinn Altis, of the Altisian sect, owed the Jedi Order little explanation of his movements or those of his followers; thus, few official records existed in the Temple’s databases. Anakin knew that Altis had remained in the Outer Rim so as to provide relief during the war for peoples outside the immediate reach of the Republic, but the Outer Rim was an immense region of space, poorly governed. Even if someone hadn’t purposefully gone to ground in those territories, they could very easily be lost. He set Artoo to scouring the database for any mention of Altis or his sect in the last four months, thinking to extrapolate a likely pattern of movement if not a precise location. With the slowing of the war, perhaps he’d get lucky. He often did.

Anakin did owe the Order explanations; explanations, and flight itineraries. He left the brightly painted Eta-2 docked in the hangar bay. Any use of his Interceptor, provided and maintained by the Jedi Order, would be automatically recorded and downloaded to the flight database. Instead, he rented a private starfighter: an older, inelegant Delta-7 Aethersprite. Like others of its line, the Delta-7 was lightly armed in contrast to the Interceptor but more heavily armored. The rental agency had taken the extra step of modifying the Delta-7 with a class three hyperdrive; illegal—class three hyperdrives were reserved for freighters, not unregistered, privately owned fighters—but useful. Anakin checked the fighter’s systems, judged them to be in acceptable working order, and paid the rental agent in gambling winnings. The discretionary account was tracked, too. In general Anakin hadn’t the patience for sabacc, but he’d needed the funds and manipulating the cards had got them for him. 

He slid the tabs over, three of the four collated, and waited for the agent to confirm. The rental agency was small, its hangar clean but without decoration or advertisement. In person it appeared as legally dubious as the modified starfighter or the agency’s net listing; it wasn’t terribly likely they’d hand over records to the local registrar’s office. Anakin flipped the last tab over his fingers and then pocketed it. He might give it to Ahsoka later, if she’d let him. It nagged him still, what she’d said to him, that the Jedi Order hadn’t prepared her for the realities of life outside it. If Anakin should leave— The air was sterile and cold. He pulled his jacket tighter about his shoulders. He hadn’t forgotten the value of money in the years since he’d first left Tatooine. He understood more of life outside the Order than most of the Jedi did.

“All right,” said the man, “credits check out. What name should I put down?” He glanced up from his datapad, the first he’d done so. His eyebrows shot up. “Hey, you’re that big shot war hero—what’s his name—Starkiller or something. Right?”

“My name isn’t important,” said Anakin, twitching his hand. “I’m simply a businessman in need of a fast ship.”

The man’s eyes glassed over; his eyebrows crept back down. Dully he said, “Your name isn’t important. You’re a businessman and you needed a fast ship. I need your signature, sir.”

Leaning over the desk, Anakin snagged the datapad and spun it around. He wrote _Starkiller, Z._ in an ineligible scrawl and then slid the pad back to the agent, who was still blinking dazedly at Anakin. The man had presence of mind enough to hand Anakin the starfighter’s key in exchange.

“Hey,” the agent said, “if you needed a fast ship, you came to the right place, sir. You have a safe trip, okay?”

Two messages had recorded on his personal comm. Once outside the mid-rung rental agency’s hangar, on the narrow and shadowed strip of sidewalk running between one building and the next, Anakin called both up. The first was from Obi-Wan, a brief request that Anakin call him back. The second was from Artoo. Deep into the alley, en route to the speeder he’d parked at a metered corner two blocks down, he checked the second. Artoo was characteristically to the point: Altis had established a refugee camp on Gela Root, in the sparsely populated Rida Ma system a month before. It was the likeliest lead.

At the speeder, Anakin paused, stretching out to feel for Padmé. She was there; she always was, even when the entirety of the Republic separated them, Padmé a little spot of light in the force, distinct only because to him she was unique, apart from all others. Now he felt for her and found her glowing. The vibrancy had grown gradually, her presence strengthening slightly every day, so slightly he hadn’t noticed until the night before when he woke to Padmé breathing heavily next to him and her distress throbbing in his chest. She was calmer, now; calm and glowing. He closed his eyes. For one fluttering moment the universe contracted to a single point. He could, faintly, and perhaps he imagined it, feel the rhythm of her breathing. Then the point shuddered and the connection collapsed; she was only a light again, a brightening candle. His breathing was his own.

This level of the mid-rung received little unfiltered sunlight. Even out of the alley and on the corner, he stood in shadows, cool shadows like twilight. Anakin popped the speeder’s door open and took the driver’s seat. The comm. fit into a port in the dash; with it plugged in, he sent a quick message to Artoo: “I’ll be at the hangar in fifteen minutes.” Artoo whistled an affirmative, and Anakin started the speeder. Really, it was a solid thirty minutes from the rental agency to the Jedi Temple’s archives, but that was true only if he followed traffic and stuck to posted speed limits. He’d modified the engine and much of the systems, bypassing the manufacturer’s built-in limits to boost performance. Technically illegal: “That isn’t _technically_ illegal,” Padmé had said, outraged, when he’d said as much to her, “it’s simply _illegal_.” 

“Are you going to report me?” he’d teased her.

Padmé had tipped her head back so she could look down her nose at him and said, “Well, just don’t expect me to ever get in that death trap.”

With the engine humming at full capacity, Anakin took off. Traffic on Coruscant was always a mess, anywhere on the planet at any time of the day, but he’d years of practice at it. Darting in and out of lanes and taking a few shortcuts that Padmé would have hit him on the shoulder for even thinking of using, once through a substantial construction zone, he crossed much of the distance in eight minutes. Rules are there for a reason: that was what she would say; but this was important, far more so than any absurd speed limit. The Jedi Temple dominated the landscape as he neared it. It was ever present, impossible to mistake for miles around, towering and built in the curving, swollen style of the twilight monarchical era and so at odds with the sharper lines and edges of the surrounding starscrapers. As usual, traffic congested in the eight block radius around the Temple, itself occupying two blocks at the center of the crawl.

Still weaving through the dense jam of speeders, Anakin drummed his fingers on the wheel and then at last punched Obi-Wan’s number into the comm. Obi-Wan answered promptly, as he did every call. 

“Anakin.”

“Master,” Anakin said, appropriately respectful. He hadn’t wanted to return Obi-Wan’s message, knowing, or suspecting, Obi-Wan would have a mission for him, some other thing that would take him from the work of finding Djinn Altis. If he hadn’t returned the call, though, Obi-Wan would be concerned, and a concerned Obi-Wan would investigate, and Obi-Wan had already spoken with Anakin of his worries that Anakin still held on to his “child’s crush” on Senator Amidala. 

“You must take care, Anakin,” Obi-Wan had said the most recent time, perhaps a week after Padmé had sent Anakin a short encoded message from Coruscant, on a private channel likewise encoded to Anakin’s Interceptor: she was pregnant. The mission, nearly at its zenith, had been revealed to him in this brief note as immaterial. Padmé was pregnant; he was going to be a father. Anakin was four days out from Coruscant and another three short of the mission’s end, two if they rushed negotiations. He made a remark to Obi-Wan that things would go much faster if Senator Amidala were with them, and Obi-Wan had taken the invitation Anakin hadn’t offered.

“You’re still fascinated with her—”

“Am I not allowed to have friendships?” Anakin had demanded hotly. “Should I cut off ties with Senator Amidala—and the council wants connections with the senate, Master Kenobi, you know that as well as I do—”

Obi-Wan pinched at his nose, between his eyes. “The connection you want with Senator Amidala isn’t one of friendship.”

“I understand and respect her decision,” Anakin said. “I’m not your padawan any more, Obi-Wan—”

That got him the look, the exasperated one. “ _Anakin_ ,” Obi-Wan said, as if Anakin were a recalcitrant child unwilling to hear reason.

“I am aware of the dangers of attachments,” Anakin had bit off before Obi-Wan could continue in that same tone. “You don’t need to lecture me. Senator Amidala and I have the same relationship we did the last time you scolded me about this.” He hadn’t lied.

Eight blocks from the Jedi Temple’s expansive archives, Anakin cut the wheel and merged into the next lane over before dropping to one below. The driver he’d cut off blared the horn at him.

“You aren’t in traffic, are you?” Obi-Wan asked, as a man facing something dreadful. “You know that it isn’t safe—”

“Relax, old man,” Anakin said, amused. “You aren’t even in the speeder. If I crash into something—”

“You won’t,” Obi-Wan said, “and you could show some respect for your old master in his dotage.”

“Of course, master.” In the lower lanes where traffic was lighter, Anakin accelerated. “What did you need to speak with me about?”

“I’d rather not discuss it while you’re endangering the lives of everyone around you.” Obi-Wan hesitated. “The council is discussing matters.”

Calm, Anakin thought. He flowed with the force, in and out of the lanes, covering the last of the blocks separating him from the Temple, rearing ever larger so that it blocked out the sky. A knot had gripped him low in the chest; it eased. If it was his relationship with Padmé that Obi-Wan meant, then Obi-Wan would have said so plainly, as he always had in the past. 

“Is it another mission?”

Obi-Wan exhaled. It sounded tinnily in the speeder’s pinched quarters. The Temple’s shadow engulfed Anakin and the speeder. He was nearly there.

“Yes,” Obi-Wan admitted, “though I’m concerned about you, Anakin, and whether you’re—”

Anakin’s jaw fixed. The knot in his chest had suffused into something harder. Another shadow lurked, the specter of another night’s poor sleep, interrupted by bleak dreams of smoke in the air and blood in his mouth and a man dead at his feet, another beside that first man; a field of corpses and his hands raw from the lightsaber’s metal grip but his stride still steady, his aim true, the mission not yet over. The mission never ended till he woke, and in the dark he remembered that a Jedi did not dream; a Jedi had no nightmares. A vision, then; but he knew that to be untrue. They were indistinct, a collection of remembered sensations cobbled together in sleep. When he’d dreamed of his mother, he’d dreamed in detail, immediate and precise.

He flexed his hands. A knuckle in his first finger popped. The joint ached with fleeting intensity.

“There’s nothing to be concerned about. Worry instead about your aging bones,” Anakin proposed, and Obi-Wan snorted. “Who’s the target?”

“There may not be a target,” Obi-Wan hedged. “The council is still convening.”

“And you decided to take a break to let me know there may or may not be a mission, master?” 

He stressed this: as a true, recognized Jedi Master, Obi-Wan sat on the council. Whatever it was they discussed, Obi-Wan knew.

“Just don’t go haring off on one of your adventures,” Obi-Wan said.

Anakin drew up to one of the side entrances to the Archives and punched in an electronic message to Artoo, telling him to come out.

“I may be out of touch for the week.”

“What for?”

“I’m following up on a lead on General Grievous’ movements,” Anakin said. “In the Mid Rim.”

Obi-Wan was silent a moment, then he said, “That may be useful to the council as they make their decision.”

So, Anakin thought. The target was Grievous. He ran his tongue over his teeth and took a slow breath, to soften the edge of his temper. If it was Grievous they wanted dead, why the secrecy? The Separatist movement was dependent upon Grievous, the last of its commanders; without him, the already splintered army would collapse, and without its army, the secessionist senate would have no shield to preserve it. The council had dithered, deferring to the Republic’s requests for diplomacy with individual worlds allied with the Separatists rather than striking at the throat.

“When the masters have made their decision, let me know,” said Anakin. Artoo had emerged from the entrance and was trundling down the ramp toward the speeder. “I’ll speak with you later, Obi-Wan. Traffic’s dense here, and I’d like to spare you the stress of horns.”

“Thank you for considering my old nerves,” said Obi-Wan dryly. “Keep me informed. And fly safely, Anakin.”

“I always fly safely,” said Anakin. “I haven’t died yet.”

“Good-bye, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said. “May the force be with you.”

Anakin paused, his hand at the comm. The lingering traces of temper bled out of him. Was it fair to nurse anger at Obi-Wan for withholding information from Anakin, when it was the douncil that refused to elevate Anakin to its ranks? Yet Obi-Wan, master, was of the douncil; he spoke with the other masters; he treated with them on matters sensitive to the Jedi. Who was to say Obi-Wan hadn’t spoken out against Anakin’s potential for mastery? Only that Obi-Wan wouldn’t, he thought fiercely, and then with some guilt. It was Chancellor Palpatine who had once, and only idly, suggested Obi-Wan blocked Anakin’s ascension to the council. Palpatine was dead, and he had been generous to Anakin; he owed it to Palpatine’s memory to consider his insights seriously. The thought rose unbidden: and he owed it to Obi-Wan to trust him.

“And may the force be with you, master,” Anakin said. 

He clicked the comm. off and popped open the long side door of the speeder, deploying the droid access ramp as he did so. Artoo rolled up into the more spacious seating area in back; he was whistling noisily.

“Yes, I know I’m late. Traffic was bad.”

Artoo didn’t see how that was his problem. Did Anakin want the data now?

“No, let’s wait until you’re jacked into the Delta-7,” Anakin said, starting the speeder up again. “There’s no sense in wasting any more time than we have to.”

Like Anakin had getting to the Archives, Artoo suggested.

Anakin laughed. “One of these days I’m going to give you a hard reboot.”

Not likely. Artoo spun his head around, looking out the window as Anakin took the speeder up into the high lanes. From a glance Anakin knew Artoo had turned to look for the condo, amidst all the other tall, lean buildings crowding the Coruscant sky. Anakin turned his attention back to flying, but already he was feeling for Padmé again, seeking her out. She wasn’t at the apartment but en route to her office at the senate, and he saw it clearly, just in the span between one blink and the next, how Padmé looked down at her dress to fuss absently with the thick folds obscuring her belly. The hand brushing over the faint curve was Padmé’s hand; he saw it through her eyes, as he would his hand.

Artoo beeped at Anakin.

“No,” he said, “we don’t need to go by the apartment. I packed everything this morning.” Simple to do, when you were a Jedi and had such few material things. A single change of clothes, a small kit of toiletries, his boots, his lightsaber, and his comm. were all he really needed, and three of those he had on his person. The boots, a gift from Padmé, had once been just short of luxurious; now they were a battered second skin.

“No need to go by the senate either,” Anakin added. Artoo was conspicuously quiet. 

As the sun rose weakly over the horizon somewhere behind all those starscrapers, Padmé had kissed Anakin and told him to be safe; they had said their good-byes in the strange half-shadows of dawn. She’d been dressed by then, in a loose morning gown that did little to hide the thickening of her hips or her breasts. The ritual was old by now, a quick kiss and then they were off, Padmé to the senate and Anakin to the stars. Duty made its demands of them. He had used to joke that they should run off one weekend without telling anyone at all where they were going, and Padmé would frown at him and say his name reprovingly, the first syllable high and the last stressed, though the corners of her dark eyes would pinch lightly so he knew she would have laughed. The week, or more, he took to seek out Djinn Altis, he’d planned to spend at home, with Padmé, their apartment an ample getaway. 

It was for her sake that he would go like this, Anakin thought. The want remained inside him, the urge to go to her office after all and pull her up out of her chair and into his arms even as she protested, as if he could by his embrace alone dispel the things gathering around Padmé: the coming election, the dreams that alarmed her; the distance between them. In the bathroom as she’d been sick, he’d brushed her hair back with his fingers and settled his arm about her shoulders, and still it had not been enough. The old shadow coiled at the back of his head, low at the place where his neck joined with his skull. The Chosen One, what was there he could not do? 

He’d got Padmé a cup of crushed ice and they’d sat there together on the bathroom floor, Padmé shuddering first as the last few spasms ran through her and then as she told him of the ghosts she saw, the way the world had thinned at the edges of her vision. Anakin would fix it. A memory bloomed of the desert, and Tusken blood in the sand, and the weight of his mother in his arms; he crushed it absolutely. He had no visions of Padmé dying, no ethereal flashes of coming torment. Nearly to the rental hangar again, he stretched out to the force. The future was ever indistinct, like a pool of waters dyed in many colors. Nothing screamed out at him. He’d an impression, somewhere in that mess of colors and the feel of a strong river pulling at his skin, of a warm place and the scent of fresh water and a child—no, more than one child, both of them young and with light voices—laughing and someone leaning down to kiss his cheek, all of this scattered like little stones thrown across a floor. Then the force closed about him again, swallowing the ghostly touch of Padmé’s hand on his arm and the name of the child he would have called out to.

Anakin opened his eyes. Without thought, entirely by instinct, he had flown the length of two blocks. Artoo warbled angrily: would Anakin mind paying attention to the lanes?

“Sorry, Artoo,” Anakin said. His skin crawled, as it did whenever he strained for a look at the far future. Already the fragments he’d snatched were falling from him; all that remained was a thought more so than a lingering sensation of contentment. “I did get us here safely, didn’t I?”

Artoo conceded the point. 

The work of moving gear from his speeder to the rented Delta-7 was as simple as packing. He’d Artoo to install in the mech port behind the canopy, a task Artoo finished as soon as Anakin got him on top of the starfighter. The one bag Anakin carried, he dumped behind the pilot’s seat in the secured lock-box. The agency would hold on to his speeder for the rental period. For personal assurance, Anakin took the time to strip out the navigation and processing cards, without which the speeder could be started but not flown, and replace them with a simple jam drive that would prevent any would be drivers from starting the engine at all. A man who wouldn’t report to the local registrar was a man who might find a profit in turning out a modified speeder. That had been one of the first lessons Obi-Wan taught Anakin, to understand the usefulness of a black market operation but also be aware of the risks. 

Anakin, only ten then and remembering how Qui-Gon had negotiated with Watto, had asked if that was in the Jedi Code. They’d stopped for a light soup at a diner Obi-Wan knew well; he’d an informant there, though he refused to tell Anakin who it was or why he needed an informant. Ten years old and sulking at being shut out, Anakin had wanted to stick Obi-Wan.

“Ah,” said Obi-Wan, and he’d looked, as he often did that first year of Anakin’s tutelage, as if he weren’t sure what to say or how to say it or why he had to anyway. “Not precisely. No. Sometimes finding the truth, and that is in the Jedi Code, means dealing with unscrupulous characters. But only if there’s no other way. You should always respect the Code.”

“Master,” Anakin started, and Obi-Wan had said brightly, “Well—what _do_ you know of the Code?” as he reached for the cup of salt to season the wide, shallow bowl they shared.

“All of it! I’ve read all of it three times,” said Anakin, “and I remember everything.”

“Then tell me everything,” said Obi-Wan, “from the beginning. And don’t leave anything out this time. I’ll notice.”

If the Jedi had found Anakin earlier, he would have already finished this easy younglings stuff. As a padawan with a master, nevertheless he had to learn all the boring things now that everyone else learned before they applied to be a padawan learner. He’d sighed then and begun reciting the Code in a grumbling monotone. 

“Lightly, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said. “You don’t have to scowl. Scowling leads to the dark side.” And he’d popped Anakin on the nose with the end of his spoon.

“When did you get funny?” Anakin demanded, rubbing at his nose. Obi-Wan had been serious on Tatooine, at times sarcastic, though it was Qui-Gon’s kindness Anakin had most noticed and not any jokes Obi-Wan might have made.

Obi-Wan had smiled oddly, his eyes on some unseen point. “Master Jinn once told me that children change you.” He reached for a napkin to wipe the spoon. “Your nose is dirty.”

“Because you hit it!”

“Don’t dwell on the past,” Obi-Wan had said mildly, “when the present has need of you.”

Children change you. Trafficking to the flight deck the floor up, Anakin considered it. The child was real. He knew that. He’d felt the flutter deep inside Padmé, the force responding to the first mindless impulses of the growing infant. Real, then, but also unreal: he would be a father. This was true; it couldn’t change. It was the imagining himself _as_ a father that mystified. What experience did Anakin have with fathers? Obi-Wan, he supposed, was the nearest thing to a father he’d known. He thought: What do I know about being a father?

He would leave the Order, of course, or allow his child—his daughter, he thought—to grow up not knowing who she was as Anakin had grown up not knowing who he was. A slave brought to Tatooine, without a home world or a people or a family outside of his mother and her name, the name she’d given him: then the Jedi had come for him and told him he was the Chosen One, and now in the dark when he slept, he woke from nightmares Jedi didn’t have. 

He could find a job outside of the Jedi Order. He’d skills, many of them, and unlike Ahsoka, he was certainly old enough for the military or planet-based security. Perhaps he could work for Padmé, as one of her guards. Poor Captain Panaka, he thought with some amusement; Anakin wouldn’t settle for less than captain. He hardly trusted them to protect her as it was. Finances rarely came up as a topic for discussion, but he knew Padmé was paid well for her work at the senate, though how well he could not say. Well enough for the condominium they shared, and Anakin didn’t pay for any of that; someone would have noticed if he drew from his allotted discretionary funds to pay for an apartment already registered to Senator Amidala.

Padmé had asked him if he could leave the Jedi as easily as all that. The roof split overhead. The lights running up the launching ramp blinked red, then as the way cleared one by one up either side they steadied and turned blue. Again, he thought: Yes. He could do it. He’d given the Jedi everything they’d wanted of him. What was there left to give him in return? The sunlight streamed through the canopy. He squinted and reached to adjust the canopy’s tint. It was like that in the council room, too, the sun in the afternoon positioned so that it shone behind the ringed seats where the masters convened or held court before supplicant Jedi. Many times Anakin had rested on his knees in that room, on the floor beneath the upraised dais where the masters sat elevated above him, and he had turned his eyes up to them only for the sun to render them all shadows, far from him.

“Download the navigational charts,” Anakin said to Artoo, and Artoo clicked an affirmative. Anakin ran through the checks, slightly different for the Delta-7: it had a slower acceleration than the Eta-2 and thus required gentler handling. His Interceptor would be faster, but no Eta-2 was available through agencies public or private; the new model starfighters, so tightly accounted for by manufacturers and the Republic’s military oversight committees, had yet to show up on any market but the one controlled by the Republic. The Interceptor was a craft for war; it was reserved for war; the Delta-7, armored but without an armory, had fallen to the realms of private collectors, bounty hunters, and rental agencies serving customers whose records they carefully did not maintain.

Padmé had said to Anakin how tired she was of fighting. I’m tired too, he thought.

The charts loaded. Anakin verified the course with Artoo and punched it in. The Delta-7 lifted slowly but smoothly, and the transition from atmosphere to space was over in a moment. He powered the hyperdrive up. Once clearing Coruscant’s gravitational pull, he’d make the jump. They’d arrive at Rida Ma after three days of hyperspace travel, an acceptable loss. Coruscant dwindled; its ring of defensive, artificial satellites neared and then those too grew smaller; he hit the hyperdrive. The stars shimmered. For a half-second they stood out starkly from the black, before collapsing into starlines. Artoo tweeted confirmation of a successful jump.

“Wake me if anything goes wrong,” Anakin said.

Artoo whistled: if anything went wrong in hyperspace, there wouldn’t be an Anakin for Artoo to wake up.

“Then you won’t have anything to worry about,” he said, leaning back into the seat. Neither of them would.

He closed his eyes, breathed in deeply, and began counting evenly down from four thousand. He would fix it; he could. Everything would be as it should have been when he’d married Padmé, in that brief and rosy moment of peace before the war. The fear clutching at the edges of this thought began to fade; serenity came in its stead. Whatever the will of the force, Anakin knew his own will. His mind cleared. Three thousand dropped to two thousand. Gradually he slipped into the trance state that would carry him through the next few days, a state devoid of vision or dream or rest; a headache and passing disorientation waited for him at the end of it. Now, the nothingness buoyed him. 

Emptied of everything, Anakin slept.

_*_

The council dispersed in the late afternoon, before the evening hour, with the intention of meeting again in the morn. Obi-Wan lingered in the corridor outside the great council room, for nothing other than the view offered by the windows opposite the double doors. The sun sank at his back, its fierce light cut off by the closing doors. Deep shadows lay instead across the city; the Temple alone cast a dark cloak over seven or eight blocks to the east. He flicked the first two fingers of his left right hand, brushing them against each other, an old nervous habit he ought to have broken himself of years ago. He had, for a time. The war had brought it back.

Three precise footsteps, softened by the rustling of robes, sounded behind him. He lowered his eyes to the busy traffic lanes below and curled his fingers into his sleeve.

“Master Shaak Ti.”

“An inspiring view,” she said, “in the morning when the sun is on the right side.”

“Sometimes a shadow brings clarity to some thing ill-defined,” he countered. He looked at her across his shoulder. 

She’d taken up a position beside him, her chest turned to him but her face to the window. As ever, Shaak Ti held herself evenly, very straight, with her hands folded and still in the hollow beneath her breasts. Her montrals gleamed in the muted lighting of the corridor.

Mildly she said, “You disagree with the council’s decision.”

He returned to the window and the city beyond it. In his sleeve, hidden by the cuff, his fingers ticked once, twice. The skin rasped.

“The council has not come to a decision.”

“Then you will have time to argue it tomorrow.”

“Do you know,” said Obi-Wan, tracing the progress of a transit speeder as it merged into a higher lane, “I haven’t had a proper meal in days. Would you care to join me?”

Something like a smile flickered across her mouth. “I’ve come to expect defter parries from you, Master Kenobi.”

He pushed away from the window. The robes of the council master were too voluminous, he thought, as he’d thought before. They tangled around his legs as he walked. He preferred the efficiency of his usual white garb.

“There’s little good to be found in dwelling on it,” he said. “I intend to meditate and return to the council tomorrow, as you will.”

Two long strides brought Shaak Ti before him. She did not stop walking so much as walk before him so that he had to slow. When she spoke, the serrated edges of her teeth flashed. 

“You believe that Anakin Skywalker should be included in the mission.”

Obi-Wan pinched the inside of his sleeve between his thumb and his first finger, and then, deliberately, he let it go.

“I look forward to debating it with you tomorrow, Master,” said Obi-Wan, and he inclined his head.

As he stepped around her, Master Shaak Ti glanced at him sidelong, a slight look that bit; it bit for the knowing in her gaze and the kindness.

“General Skywalker is no longer your padawan,” Shaak Ti said. “He passed his trials long ago. He doesn’t need your protection or your guidance now. You may love him, but take care, Master Kenobi, that you do not confuse feeling for reason.”

She left then, before he might rebut her without making a scene of it. His nape was pricking, the skin drawn tight. There was a joke in it, he thought, to be lectured for attachment, when Obi-Wan had strived to remind Anakin of the dangers. But to worry for Anakin, to love him as he would a brother— Of course it would not seem an ill thing. This was the old struggle, the one every padawan faced: to understand the line between compassion and an emotional bond that endangered the spirit and dwarfed rational thought. Masters, he knew, struggled with it too.

Obi-Wan looked out a window again, at the purpling sky and the thickening shadows as they spread like dark spider webs between the towers of Coruscant. The stars would not show here on Coruscant, the light pollution too absolute. Anakin is my brother, Obi-Wan thought. He could not always protect him. Anakin saw challenges in the council, further trials to overcome, and there were those on the council who saw danger in Anakin, uncertainty. Obi-Wan wanted, unreasonably, to call out to Shaak Ti and say, “He is only a boy,” but Anakin had not been a boy for years. Standing in the corridor, Coruscant’s night lights like stars shining below rather than above, Obi-Wan thought of Master Jinn and he thought, too, of the promise he had made Qui-Gon and then to Anakin. 

Master Shaak Ti had trained two padawans and seen both dead. If Anakin were to die, thought Obi-Wan. He would not think of it. Anakin had been a child when Qui-Gon found him in the desert; he’d been a child when Obi-Wan told him that he would train Anakin in the force. Once, before the war, on that long night as they chased the woman who would have assassinated Senator Amidala, Anakin had said to Obi-Wan that he was the closest thing to a father Anakin had ever known.

He stayed there, working his fingers, until the sun had gone and Coruscant, shining Coruscant, had chased away the shadows. He would speak with Senator Amidala soon, he thought impulsively; not to extract vows from her but simply to sit with her and speak for a time, as a friend would. Whatever Anakin had felt for her, whatever he still wanted, he too was friends with the senator; they cared for one another, and Anakin had sworn to Obi-Wan that their relationship had remained thus. He wasn’t a boy any more. Trust him, Obi-Wan thought.

He sighed, and after he’d done, the worry had lessened some. Let it go; let it go. That was always how it was. He would trust Anakin, and when the council reconvened in the morning he would argue for all the masters to trust Anakin. The war had taken its pound of flesh from all of them; no one else was better fitted to hunt for Grievous. Then, with Grievous deposed and the Separatists with no recourse left to them but concession, Obi-Wan would suggest, as he had before when Anakin was sixteen or seventeen and struggling with his temper, to Anakin that he take a sabbatical at one of the old Jedi monasteries, where he might find the equilibrium he lacked. He ought to have suggested a retreat long ago, but the war had not allowed for it. Perhaps now he might. Distance from the political and martial machinations of Coruscant would do Anakin good. Distance, too, from Padmé—but Obi-Wan trusted Anakin. Still.

Obi-Wan straightened his sleeves. He did so dislike the weight of the master’s robes; he felt lost in them. The council would reach its decision soon, and then he could hang the robes up again. His reflection in the window was faint, ill-formed, a pale thing like a desert wraith. He turned from it and walked, alone, down the corridor to the lift. His footsteps were his own and they were steady, and he only felt somewhat of a charlatan, kitted out as a master, when he exchanged a bow of the head with a young knight and her padawan on the lift.

*

Ten minutes out from the Rida Ma system, Artoo roused Anakin with a warbling note pitched at an exact frequency to jar him. Rather than easing out of the trance, Anakin snapped to awareness. In those first few seconds, before he’d adjusted to wakefulness, he was dangerously open, and the force enveloped him. He was at the edge of a lake reassuring a small boy that his sister wouldn’t dunk him again; he was on the bridge of a sleek star ship, breathing through a ventilator; Anakin was braiding a young girl’s hair for her as somewhere else in the house Padmé and the boy laughed together. Ahsoka, her montrals wicked spikes towering over her head, stood at the end of a long, cold hallway on a long, cold vessel with a lightsaber in her hand that ignited. An old man with yellowed eyes smiled at him, and Anakin both loved him and wanted to tear the vile thing’s mouth out so he’d never smile like that at Anakin again. Padmé, enormous with pregnancy, was struggling to breathe through a compressing throat, her windpipe closed, the bones straining not to break, and the world behind her was a monstrous, burning place.

Then she was sitting with him in the attic of a house on a child’s bed, and her feet were in his lap. She’d wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and along her mouth, and she was saying how strange it seemed, somehow, to bring out Luke’s childhood bed so that Luke and Mara’s son would have a bed of his own to sleep in when they came to visit again. And then he was alone again, absolutely alone, and his lungs were fragile patchwork, sustained not by his heart but the complex cybernetic workings that had replaced the heart, so that he would still breathe when he should have died, as Padmé had died and the child had died and Obi-Wan had not; he was alone, and he had always been alone, and it was what he deserved, to live like that forever, alive and not alive, as much a vile thing as the old man who commanded he rise. He rose.

The breadth of the universe and all its many twins constricted, so that its weight would have crushed him. His mind emptied. He had no mind to empty. For a moment, Anakin ceased entirely to exist; all awareness he possessed of his self failed him. He forgot it all.

Then the old walls came up again. He closed, and the force was once more only a whisper. Anakin blinked rapidly, widening his eyes between blinks, and passed a hand roughly over his face. His head pounded. He sucked in a harsh breath through his nose and fought the urge to vomit. He’d seen something, he thought; but it was gone. He dug with his thumb at the inside corner of his eye, and his fingers bit at the brow over his other eye. The metal fingers were hard beneath the glove. They pressed painfully against the bone. The pain steadied him. The torrent had receded, taking with it the strange, ghostly images that had been so overwhelming and now were so fine as to slip from him entirely. He let them slip. They were only ghosts.

Artoo warbled again, and Anakin said, “No, I’m fine. It’ll pass soon. Navigate us toward Gela Root.” If he turned his head too quickly, his vision blurred. “I’ll take over once we’re in comm. distance.”

It was the jerking to that had done it, but he’d rather deal with the dizziness than the slowness of a gradual awakening. Massaging his eyes again—he pulled at the lower lids, dragging his cheeks down—Anakin steeled against the ache in his head and the turning of the stars, in the periphery. As promised, in comm. range of Gela Root he switched the Delta-7 back to manual pilot. The response to the automated ID transmission, and the secondary confirmation number he had to type in, was immediate: he was cleared for approach at the camp itself rather than one of the fortified posts ringed around it.

On the descent, Anakin stretched through the force, reaching to find Djinn Altis. The man was there in the camp. The odd, half-muted feel of Altis, that was as unmistakable now as it had been two and a half years before. Then, Anakin had found the strangeness of Altis unsettling, from his teachings to his influence outside the Jedi Order to the peculiarity of his presence within the force. Anakin flexed the fingers of his left hand and then did so again, each finger on its own. His mind cleared. The second knuckle in his thumb popped. He bent his wrist and then swiveled his hand so that joint cracked as well. The trick he had learned during the war was one of focus, to hone his tendency for obsession into purpose.

After a brief stop to confirm his ID in person and then, in a tiny bathroom, to piss, he left Artoo with the Delta-7 in the small and crowded hangar that serviced the camp. Like many such camps founded over the course of the war, the Gela Root camp was a tightly packed enclave of prefabricated buildings, serviceable but hardly pleasant. He assessed them, each of them, with light brushes. Habit, now, to feel for threats, hidden away; he’d done similar instinctive searches of the apartment more than once, never meaning to do so but doing it anyway. Much of the grass in the camp had been trampled away till only dirt remained between the square, barracks-reminiscent buildings; and much of that dirt was mud, a thick and sucking mud that stuck to his boots. Someone had taken the time to paint a number of bright murals along the metal walls, although the frequent rain had blurred the colors.

The man who walked Anakin from the hangar to the office of operations put on a similarly bright face, just as false. He was worried as to why a general had come to the camp, unescorted, and afraid to ask Anakin why. Anakin didn’t bother to reassure the man or to ask for his name. Perhaps he ought have; it was the sort of thing Padmé would do. He didn’t particularly care to do either, any more than he cared to ask of the camp. Later, he would think to do something for them. Then, all he did care for was to see Altis. 

At the operations office, the man handed Anakin over to a tall woman with a scarred face. “She’ll take you to Master Altis. This is General Anakin Skywalker, of the Republic.”

She rose from her seat behind the desk in that first small room and extended her hand to Anakin. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”

He shook her hand once and then let it drop. “I need to speak with Altis now.” Anakin glanced to the left corner of the ceiling: Altis was there, two floors up, to the far left. Without either guide, he began to walk down the corridor toward the lift.

The woman hurried to catch up with him. Tall as she was, she was still shorter than Anakin, and it was as easy to dismiss her from consideration as the man before her.

“We weren’t expecting you, General Skywalker. We received no message—”

“I sent none,” Anakin said. He preceded her into the lift and, as she slipped in, he thumbed the button for the third floor. “It’s—” _Personal business_ would give too much away. Smoothly he finished, “Not a matter for record.”

She took the hint, then. He certainly hadn’t tried to soften it. Stiffly, the woman waited in silence beside him for the lift to finish its work. Anakin tapped a finger against his thigh and thought, he should have dismissed the first guide outside the office and just gone up the side of the building. When the lift did stop and the doors opened, the woman stepped out before him, cutting Anakin off, and briskly led him to the first door on the left of the corridor, to a room with a low ceiling and one long window looking out on a grey sky.

“Master Altis,” she said, “General Skywalker is here to see you.”

Altis had little changed in the intervening years. His gut had thickened, in the way older men often thickened. He looked unsurprised to see Anakin there, but then he would have sensed Anakin’s approach from some distance, the lobby at the very latest. He was seated at a small, round table with another two persons, a human man and a spindly Rodian woman, neither of whom Anakin recognized personally. A cursory sweep confirmed they were both force sensitive. More of Altis’ many apprentices; past or present, it hardly mattered. 

“Thank you, Corita,” said Altis, and the woman, without looking to Anakin, smiled and bowed her head and left them there. The door whisked shut behind her. 

“Forgive me for not standing,” Altis said. He grimaced ruefully and touched a hand to the small of his back. “Old age hasn’t agreed with me. Let’s put it that way. Would you like some caf? It isn’t good, but it is strong.”

Anakin made to say no—then, with his head still aching, he shrugged a shoulder and said, “Yes.” 

The other man at the table rose to grab Anakin a cup from a card table set up by the window. As he did so, Altis said, “You aren’t here to check on our little camp, I’d wager.”

“If you wagered,” murmured the Rodian pointedly. 

Altis laughed and said, “Yes, if I wagered.” 

He was still smiling at the Rodian, but his eyes flickered; he looked at Anakin, and Anakin knew, very clearly, that Altis had no more forgotten the nature of their last discussion those years ago than Anakin ever could. Then, after the mission to rescue Agent Hallena Devis, Altis had spoken with Anakin of attachment: of Altis’ own belief, shared with the force users he had trained over the years, some of whom, like Altis, had even married, that love, of itself, did not lead inevitably to the dark side. At the end of it, Altis had said to Anakin that should he ever find reason to leave the Jedi, or if they were to dismiss him—and they would not, Anakin suspected, as the Jedi needed him too badly—that Anakin would be welcome among Altis’ sect, if he should want their community.

“I don’t seek recruits,” Altis had said firmly, but he had given Anakin that assurance: there were orders outside of the Jedi, communities of force users, among them Altis and his followers, not beholden to the Jedi Council.

The human man, returning, pushed the cup of caf at Anakin. It was thick, like the dark mud outside, and lukewarm, and it smelled nearly as foul as it looked. Anakin drained the cup. Cradling it, he looked directly to Altis.

“I’d like to speak with you alone.”

Altis rubbed at his back a final time; he was studying Anakin, not out of wariness but for some other reason. Concern, perhaps. Altis nodded.

“Master,” started the man beside Anakin.

“We can finish reviewing the plumbing problem when I’m done with General Skywalker,” Altis said. The thin Rodian stood and gestured to the man to come with her.

“Thank you, Ritu.”

“Of course, Master,” she said in a serene voice. She gestured again to the man, who’d set his jaw mulishly, and then snapped her fingers sharply once at him. As serenely she finished, “We’ll be waiting outside, Master Altis.”

Then they were alone, at last, the old master in his chair with his back bent and Anakin clutching an emptied cup, layered as if with silt at the bottom. The caf was bitter in his mouth. 

“Please sit, General,” said Altis. “I won’t feel so old if you’re sitting down as well.”

“I don’t intend to be here long,” Anakin said, but he did take the offered seat, one neither Ritu nor the other man had occupied, across from Altis.

Altis shifted in his seat; he leaned forward just so. His hands, flat, palms down, settled on the table, the right hand with a tremor in the little finger that he stilled. In a moment Altis would ask Anakin of progress in the war, or if he meant to stay long enough that they would have to prepare a room for him. The caffeinated drink had worked to clear Anakin’s mind. He had come closer those few years ago to confessing, to Djinn Altis, than he ever had to anyone else before or since. It was something in the man’s aura, a suggestion of absolute acceptance, but stronger than this was the reality that Altis, outside the Order, would have no obligation to report anything Anakin told him to the Council. He hadn’t confessed, in the end, not to Altis; not to anyone. The words had sat in him till he wanted to spit them out into someone’s face: a master’s face, every master that sat on the venerated Council.

“Is it personal business,” said Altis, “that brings you to Gela Root?”

Anakin was still holding on to the cup. Unremarkable, mass-produced, it existed for the one purpose: a cup, for serving. Padmé made a point of buying cups produced by Naboo artisans, things that could be admired and contemplated as well as drunk from. Beautiful things were never made for war. He set the cup down on the table and fixed on Altis.

“You were married.”

“Yes, long ago,” said Altis. He was waiting. “Callista—do you remember Callista? She and Geith—”

“I didn’t come to speak about Callista,” said Anakin. He curled his hands beneath the table, fists where Altis could not see them. “Did you have children?”

Altis studied Anakin. His head tipped, very slightly; then he looked away, his eyes turned to some other point far from them.

“No,” he said, “we weren’t so fortunate, though some others of my followers have families.”

Anakin’s fingernails, clipped short, bit into his palm. The metal hand gave him no pain. 

“You’ve come a very long way,” said Altis thoughtfully, still considering that distant place, “to ask me of my wife.”

At the cusp of it, Anakin had stumbled. The words had caught in his throat. Too long, he’d kept the silence, and for all his bravado—all his vaunted fearlessness—he’d fallen short again. His jaw clicked; he set it. What was it Altis had said to Anakin in the Leveler’s hangar? “Could you let someone go, if you loved them?” Could he live without her?

“The last time we met,” Anakin said steadily and hard, “we spoke of the dangers of attachment. There was something I didn’t tell you, and you knew it. I’m telling you now. I was married then. I am married.” 

Altis was still, but he was, Anakin thought, unsurprised; perhaps the particulars were new, but he had suspected, and he had said nothing. So like a Jedi, to wait passively for a man to gut himself. Anakin pushed on.

“She’s pregnant. In five months we’ll have a daughter. The pregnancy is not what we were prepared for. She’s—” 

His hands fisted again. He had thought, for some stupid reason, that confession would liberate, that to give voice to it all would ease him as Obi-Wan had instructed years ago when Anakin was still just a boy. Instead he found his temper was rising, as it always rose, for Altis’ patience and silence, and the knowledge that he had flown three days out from Coruscant to speak with Djinn Altis when Master Ki-Adi-Mundi of the Council had wed five wives and seen seven daughters born. None of this was fair; none of this was right; none of it was what Padmé needed or deserved.

Altis sighed, and Anakin wanted to stand again and leave and to hell with all of them, the Council and Altis and every wise man that had ever looked down at him and sighed kindly like that. His throat hurt; he’d clenched it shut. Breathe deeply, Obi-Wan would say; mind your temper. To hell with Obi-Wan, Anakin thought savagely.

Altis didn’t say anything at all, but, after a moment, for the one conclusion: “She isn’t a Jedi.”

Anakin breathed evenly through his nose. “No,” he said. 

He offered no names. Altis asked for none. 

“Tell me what you know,” he said. 

Carefully, Anakin began to relax his hands, one finger and then another, the old trick. As he did so, he told Altis—shortly—of the visions, the dreams; he elided Padmé recoiling from his hand. She hadn’t told him what it was she’d seen in sleep, but he had caught some echo of it in the way her shoulders trembled when he passed his arm around them. Altis listened quietly to Anakin, who looked to the utilitarian cup. It was the sort of cup Obi-Wan would keep. Obi-Wan would not have sat in silence and listened as Anakin spoke till he’d finished; they’d known each other too long and too well. 

“It isn’t unheard of,” said Altis, when Anakin was done. “Tauw Ot—a student of mine, years ago—his wife had strong visions when she was pregnant with their … second child. The first child isn’t force sensitive. There hasn’t been any real concentrated study of it. The Jedi have done much to research and understand midichlorians and their relationships with the force and a single person, but…”

“Jedi don’t have children,” Anakin said. They’d no reason to explore how or why or even if a force user might have a child sensitive to the force or closed off from it.

“So,” Altis agreed. He stroked the back of one hand with the other. The fine tremor in his finger had come back. “Your midichlorian count—it’s high?” The question was rhetorical.

“The highest ever recorded,” said Anakin, and he smiled thinly. 

“It’s different for those of us with the force,” said Altis after a time. “We grow up with it. Callista, she came to me when she was already grown. She’d never had training, but she’d learned to channel the force in her own way. Your wife… She’ll need training. This is all new to her. She doesn’t know how to live with it.” He hesitated. “It isn’t what I recommend to my students, but perhaps—Tauw Ot’s wife went into seclusion with him. It was easier for her, away from the rest of the world.”

“That isn’t an option right now,” Anakin said shortly.

He’d gripped the cup again, an alternative to gouging his palm. Looking at it, not looking at Altis, Anakin stood abruptly and walked to the small table by the window. Altis’ hands trembled, riddled with old age, but Anakin was steady. When could he afford to be anything less? The pot of caf was low; he poured what remained into his cup. The caf was the same cheap blend used at every military outpost and base across the galaxy, and the smell of it stuck in his nose same as it did every time he drank it.

“She doesn’t have force training,” Altis was saying. “Learning to process all of this would be hard enough for her even if she were at the Temple on Coruscant.”

Something in his tone stuck at Anakin. He glanced sharply at Altis, but if the old master suspected—if he knew it was Padmé—like any decent sabacc player, no hint of this showed on his face. If Anakin were on the outside, he supposed Padmé would be his first suspicion. For a time they’d been jointly famous, celebrated in the news throughout the Core for their continual diplomatic successes: the Jedi and the Senator; how enormously romantic. Too, their shared history was a matter of public record. Padmé had gained galactic renown over the course of the short Naboo War, and Anakin’s part in it had been dredged up after Christophsis, part of the media’s ongoing effort to—how had Padmé put it? Create mythologies for its heroes.

He’d laughed at her for saying that. “That isn’t a myth. I did destroy that control ship. Saved all of Naboo—you were there, weren’t you, on Naboo?”

That had got him one of Padmé’s fussy looks, the ones she doled out when he pretended not to know what she meant.

Rain began to ping against the thin window. A few stragglers outside on the muddy paths ducked their heads and made for the buildings around them. The camp was grey and miserable and clearly underfunded, the sort of thing Padmé would want to address if he told her of it, to the senate if she had to in order to get the attention this needed. I should care about them, Anakin thought as a child ran through the shower, hand in hand with her mother. He did, distantly; they were all shadows next to Padmé. The child was laughing, her face turned up to the thickening rain.

He looked back at Altis again.

“Senator Amidala,” said Anakin coolly, “has preexisting commitments.”

Altis did then cover his face with one hand. He rubbed at his forehead as though it pained him; fortunate, that this also hid his eyes from Anakin.

“You are training her?”

“Ahsoka is while I’m here,” said Anakin. He set the cup down, hard so the table rattled. Three days. His lips peeled back. “Nothing you’ve said has been anything I didn’t already know.”

The hand slipped down Altis’ face; it fell away from him. He studied the fingertips and said, “I can only tell you what I know.” His fingers curled loosely. “Your wife will be aware of the force, in ways she never has before. She’ll struggle with it whether you’re with her or not. But you had a chance to find out more, from someone who wouldn’t … gossip, and you took it. For what it’s worth,” said Altis, “I am sorry that I can’t do more for you.” He laid his hand down flat again. 

“I would have liked to have children,” he said, then nothing else.

Three days, Anakin thought again, and three more back. The rain fell so fiercely now that the haze swallowed the camp; only vague shadows showed beyond the alley separating the office of operations from the next building over. He’d run more useless errands for the Jedi over the years, drab escort missions, diplomatic envoys, all the grubbing political things he’d rather leave to the senate. Those were more Padmé’s specialty than his; she’d her knack for people and he’d his lightsaber, and that had worked out well enough. He folded his arms across his chest. The mud out there would be even nastier than it had been on the way in.

“Where are the refugees coming from?” Anakin asked suddenly. “The Separatists were never able to get into the Rida Ma system.” Not for the strength of the Republic: Rida Ma was an isolated system with no close neighbors, and its most central colony, Tshu Mada, with which the other, smaller satellite worlds were associated, was an independent world with few natural or economic resources to offer a new-made secessionist government. Gela Root, muddy and wet, amply demonstrated much of Rida Ma.

“Some sought asylum from other systems,” Altis said. “Most are running from Tshu Mada.”

“Tshu Mada?” Anakin furrowed his brow. “Have they sided with the Separatists?”

The calm aura around Altis broke. Surprise washed over him. 

“You haven’t heard,” said Altis. “The Desilijic clan is expanding.”

Anakin stared at Altis. Desilijic: Hutts; that was Jabba’s clan. 

“You’re sure,” he said. “Tshu Mada is in the Mid Rim. The Desilijic clan has stuck to Hutt Space,” that poorly defined region marking the border between the Mid and Outer Rims.

“If it isn’t them personally, it’s an organization working in their name. Slavers have been coming to Rida Ma for the last four months,” Altis said. “Neutral markings, but the credit trail leads to one of Jabba’s captains.”

As an independent, Tshu Mada was outside the influence, and the protection, of the Galactic Republic as well as the Separatists: if Outer Rim slavers raided Rida Ma, the Republic wouldn’t step in; legally it could not without invitation from Tshu Mada’s government. Sith shit slavers. Obi-Wan liked to say Anakin ran hot, but he felt very cold when his temper flared. He was cold then.

“They’re brave,” he said, “coming into the Mid Rim like that.” He glanced at Djinn Altis, who had lent the support of his sect to the Galactic Republic for the war. “Did Tshu Mada ask for your aid?”

Altis shook his head. “If you’re thinking you can pry open the back door, you can’t. This is entirely voluntary. My people are acting on our own, outside of the Order’s jurisdiction. I can’t prove it, but I suspect Tshu Mada’s elders are cooperating with the Hutts.”

“In exchange for what? Money? More power?” 

They shouldn’t need an invitation to intervene on behalf of the people, he thought. The sovereignty of Tshu Mada was forfeit the moment its sovereigns forfeited its people to slavers. If he had killed Jabba on that mission years ago to rescue the Hutt’s child, the clan would still be struggling to organize; one of the other Hutt clans might even have consumed the Desilijic’s holdings on Tatooine. Yet the Republic had insisted Jabba be placated: the Desilijic Hutts were too wealthy, too powerful in the Outer Rim to be allowed to ally with the Separatists.

“I’ll speak with Senator Amidala about this,” Anakin said, half to himself.

“She’s as restricted as you are,” Altis countered. “The senate would have to vote on it, and they won’t take violating a neutral world’s independence lightly.”

He thought to say, “They want to make her vice-chair of the Republic”; but Padmé had sworn she would not accept the nomination.

“You don’t know much of politics,” said Anakin instead. The senate had voted often to violate all sorts of laws during the course of the war; what was one more? If Chancellor Palpatine were yet alive, he would agree with Anakin; but he was dead now. The next thought that came to him was a colder one, colder even than his anger, so much so he felt it as a fire would a dousing: Would Padmé agree?

Padmé. He had come to Gela Root for Padmé, and then he had let his old angers take charge of him. Slavers in the Mid Rim: there were slavers everywhere, even in the colonies just outside the Core. He had promised his mother one day he would return to Tatooine and free all the slaves, and he hadn’t done that; the Jedi hadn’t and neither had the Republic; no one had. The enormity of it stretched endlessly. He would be a father soon. That was what he thought of, rather than Shmi’s broken breathing in that dark tent where she had died and was, somehow, in his mind, forever dying: Padmé was pregnant, and they were going to have a child. The vastness of the galaxy condensed to that singular truth.

Anakin turned from the window looking out on the camp.

“My wife is waiting for me,” he said.

Djinn Altis, his hair grey and his face worn, said only, “Tell her I wish her well. And I’m sorry there isn’t more I can do for you.”

“I’m sorry as well,” said Anakin. “I’ll see if Senator Amidala can get you more funding. Politicians have a way of getting money.”

Altis laughed, not unkindly. 

“You do what you can,” he said, his tired eyes crinkling. “That’s all any of us really can do.”

Anakin was at the door when Altis called out to him again. Pausing, Anakin looked to see Djinn Altis leaning back in his chair.

“If you do want my advice,” Altis said, “think about who it is you do want to confess to. And if you should ever find that you need help,” he said, “that the order can’t give you—well.”

“I’ll find you,” Anakin said; but he thought Altis knew now that the offer would stay as it had for the last few years, open, untaken.

Altis held his hand up in farewell. 

In the corridor, Altis’ two companions both looked at Anakin. The man quickly turned away again, but the Rodian, Ritu, she watched Anakin as he walked back to the lift. Let her watch, and wonder why General Skywalker had come to speak with Altis for so few minutes. He was thinking of Ahsoka, who had, that day in the gardens, looked at him as though he had told her he hadn’t trusted her; why else had he never shared with Ahsoka that he was married? His first solo mission, Anakin had been twenty; that was when he had received orders to safeguard Padmé. How many times had Anakin sent Ahsoka on missions without him, so he might spend a scant few days with Padmé? 

The lift doors closed. He rode the lift down to the ground floor. Over and over he turned his hand, massaging the wrist. The metal of his robotic hand chilled his skin. It was Obi-Wan who had suggested he stretch his fingers out, picturing each knuckle as it straightened and, as he flexed his fingers, bent again. Meditation, Obi-Wan called it, for a boy who would rather have raced him down the steps than sit cross-legged in silence.

The woman with the scarred face was in the lobby, speaking with someone over the comm. The scars were new ones, thinly healed, with the characteristic serrated edging of an amped up electro-whip. He’d a scar with a jagged edge like that on the back of his right thigh. The electro-whip was especially popular in the Outer Rim.

At Anakin’s approach, she covered the mouth-piece. “Would you care for an escort?”

“No,” he said, “your help won’t be necessary. I remember how to get back.” Hitching his jacket’s collar higher, he stepped out into the rain.

*

They watched Skywalker stride down the corridor to the lift, like a man accustomed to the rush of war, as he was, and Kuem waited till the lift doors had closed to mutter, “The Jedi Order won’t be happy with him.” He was shaking his head, his lips pursed.

“ _You’re_ married,” Ritu countered, on instinct. Recently, too, to his boyfriend of several years. She knew they had discussed adopting children now and then.

“I’m not the Order’s sanctified prophet.”

“Not a prophet,” Ritu said. “Prophesied. The Chosen One, bringing balance to the force.” She recited it by rote, but she was elsewhere, thinking.

Kuem shrugged. “Doesn’t matter either way, Jedi Knight Ritu.”

Ritu had left the Order years ago, out of a growing dissatisfaction with the Council and a number of rulings made by the masters regarding the role the Jedi played in the Republic. She had argued it with her master, that the Jedi should not serve the senate, that they were not soldiers to be used by the Republic in its political games. The gibe from Kuem was an old one and affectionate, nearly as dear as their friendship.

“I’m not a Knight any more,” Ritu said sharply. 

Already turning to rejoin Master Altis in the conference room, Kuem stopped and looked back at her with his thick mammalian eyebrows raised. Ritu wished devoutly that he had not joked that they should listen in on Altis and Skywalker, and that she had not agreed to it. He was only human with a human’s weak hearing; if she’d said no, they neither of them would have known why General Skywalker had come to speak with Altis.

Her third lids closed over her eyes. She inclined her head very delicately. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” said Kuem, after a pause, “I’m sorry. I was just being an asshole,” and he gestured at himself as if to also say, “as I often do.”

Ritu smiled in the Rodian fashion, with a triple blink. “As my old master would say, it’s forgotten.”

He snorted as he tapped the door panel, and likely he would have made another smart remark if she hadn’t snapped at him for the earlier joke. Kuem, like many of Altis’ students, had come to force training well after childhood; his parents had refused to allow the Jedi to claim him. He didn’t understand, Ritu thought. He couldn’t. Bre Zish, another who had left the Order, he would understand, but Kuem thought of the Council as a far-off jest, unimportant, backwards, unwise. That much of the Republic would hold the opposing opinion—that Altis’ sect was one of half-mad apostates—would only make Kuem laugh harder. He’d never learned of the old force dynasties, of the feudal Jedi clans that had fought each other thousands of years ago, before the Order had put a stop to the bloodlines.

She followed Kuem into the conference room. Master Altis was gazing at his hands, deep in thought.

“Master?” Kuem asked.

Altis stirred. “Yes—Kuem,” he said. “Forgive me. All this rain is making me slow. Now, where were we? Plumbing troubles, yes.”

“It’s all full of shit,” said Kuem, and he laughed.

Ritu pulled her pocket datapad out and began drawing up the needed documents again. She had reconciled with many of Altis’ teachings. The fallibility of the Jedi Order was something she had accepted long ago. She had thought she’d come to terms with the freedom Altis allowed his students, to have children. Anakin Skywalker was attuned to the force to a degree no other Jedi had known; they had gossiped about it, the padawans had, how high his midichlorian count must be, how powerful he already was, that the Council would have agreed to his training. His children would be strong in the force as well. 

Discreetly Ritu glanced at Kuem and Master Altis; neither of them appeared at all concerned with anything other than the over-taxed water systems. The skin under her scales itched as though she were molting. That damned rain. Dynasties and bloodlines, she thought. She shouldn’t have listened at the door.

“Listen to it go!” said Kuem. The storm winds had started up; the window rattled with it, as did the pre-fab walls. “We’re going to have sewage everywhere after this.”

“So let’s try to be done with it soon,” Altis said.

Ritu set her datapad on the table and turned it so that Master Altis might see. Tapping the screen, she said, “If we lay down piping to a secondary location…”

*

Over the course of the war the Senate building had strengthened security, effectively barring the public from the whole of the building. In the wake of the hostage crisis, Chancellor Palpatine had said, they’d little other choice. Padmé had disliked the new measures. Publicly she’d denounced them as well-intended but far too exclusionary; privately she’d called the new laws an act of political violence that cut the people out from the government.

Anakin still found it far too easy to slip unnoticed into the rotunda. The guards ought to have noticed him; someone should have asked to check his credentials. Once in the actual building, the few guards he passed either recognized him or presumed that if he had passed the first security checkpoint, he was cleared. He’d never have permitted such slack with Captain Rex and the 501st. His mood darkened the closer he got to Padmé’s office.

A guard was stationed outside the office, a man from her personal guard under the command of Captain Typho. Anakin couldn’t think of the man’s name. The face, he knew. 

“I need to see your ID, sir.”

“You know who I am. I’ve seen you before.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the guard. He stared at a point over Anakin’s shoulder. The point wasn’t why the man looked so uncomfortable. “I need to see your ID. Sir.”

Anakin fished the chip from his pocket. The guard bent to scan it with a small reader device strapped to his wrist. A green light flashed and he straightened.

“You’re clear, general, sir,” the guard said. “Thank you for patience.”

“I’ll be sure to let Senator Amidala know what a good job you’re doing,” Anakin said, striding past him into the office.

She wasn’t there in the main room; he’d felt it as soon as he stepped onto the floor. The lounge, then. The transparisteel windows looked out on the city. The afternoon sun illuminated the elegant carpeting, an elaborate, soft-edged geometric design representing the mountain peaks and river shores of Naboo. She’d had it put in the year before, to brighten up the office. The pattern continued under the old-fashioned handled doors that opened onto the lounge. One of the doors was ajar. A long finger of sunlight reached through the space made.

Padmé, seated on one of the settee sofas, was already looking to the doors as he walked to them. She had a strange look, dreamy almost, his wife who never dreamed. Then her eyes focused. She jumped, clapping a hand down over the datapad set on the edge of the table to steady it.

“Anakin! Oh, my goodness.” She pressed that hand over her heart. “You startled me.”

He shouldered the door the rest of the way open and then leaned against the door jamb. “Were you expecting someone else?”

Her brow creased. His chest clenched, and he thought, irrationally, jealously: Clovis; Organa, married though he was to another. Anakin was married to Padmé and yet he spent less time with her than any one of her colleagues. Close after this came the guilt, deep in his gut, that he should even worry about anyone paying attention to Padmé. He crushed both.

Padmé noticed neither. Her attention had gone inward.

“No,” she said slowly, “but that’s the strange thing. I _was_ expecting you. I was sitting here thinking of you walking through the halls to my office, and then you were coming through the door. And then you were right there.” 

Her fingers moved delicately across her clavicle, as if to illustrate the path he’d taken. The line of bone stood out under her fingernails. She’d worn a sort of undergarment that lifted her breasts, so that her loose gown, cut to cling to her chest, fell in a straight line from her bosom, masking the curve of her belly. The fabric pooled in her lap. Her breasts, hoisted so, showed soft and smooth. She’d her hair up in a gold-trimmed net, but a spray of long, artful curls fell alongside her throat; they gleamed darkly against her skin.

The corner of her mouth curled. She said, “Annie,” in a laughing way. The once fitted—now too tight—hem of her gown pinched her breasts. When she smiled at him like that, he felt almost as though he were drowning. In the lounge, like this, she was overpowering: the look of her, the smell of her, how she enveloped him warmly in the force. Those curls swayed as she cocked her head, looking at him.

“What is it?” she asked. Her smile faded. That sensation of brightness and warmth dimmed. “You learned something.”

He shook his head. “Nothing we didn’t already suspect. I swear,” he said, as she went on looking at him. 

Padmé turned from him. She reached for the datapad on the table. The long, amber eardrops she wore shimmered, a match to the net woven into her twisted hair. She’d worn something like that on Naboo, that day in the meadow, and a yellow dress with misty, embroidered sleeves. This gown with the high bodice she wore now had sleeves like bells, dripping from her elbows. She shook the train clear of her arm and looked up at him again. She’d marshaled her features into something implacable. In the meadow she’d laughed, and her eyes had been so brown, and all around them, at her back, fragrant flowers had bloomed.

“What did Master Altis say?” she asked him. 

The office was cool and humid, a concession to Naboo, always near to her. But for the perfume she wore, and that thinly, the lounge smelled only of recycled air and beneath that, moisture. The bay windows along the wall offered a view on to the rooftop gardens a street over. Like all the other rooftop gardens on Coruscant, clear hothouse walls protected the greenery from the high altitude winds and the ever present smog. It was a false wilderness. Metal towered above it. Padmé sat on the sofa before the windows, and those angular starscrapers spiked the sky. The sunlight, reflected off solar panels and the faced stones on the outsides of buildings, was harsh on her skin. 

Anakin stayed a moment more at the door. His throat hurt hum. Then, mechanically, he put one foot before the other, and the other before the one. He sat beside her on the sofa. Their knees pressed together. He reached for her right hand with his flesh one. He wanted to feel her skin, the fine bones of her fingers; the finer hairs on her knuckles. Her thumb nail was painted white, a mountain tradition. Anakin studied her hand, holding it gently. At her family home, he had met Padmé’s sister, Sola, a tall woman with a frank bearing and a ring tattooed about her wrist, with a twining, inky river that ran three inches up the inside of her arm. That was another tradition from the mountains outside Theed, Padmé had explained; a married woman would tattoo her right wrist. Anakin hadn’t known if the free men of Tatooine had such traditions. Slaves could not marry.

Padmé’s wrist was bare, her hand unmarked. The lacquer on her thumb nail had been painstakingly sealed. She wore a heavy ring on her thumb and a slender band on the little finger. Her heart beat in her wrist. Padmé squeezed his hand. She leaned toward him, tipping her head so she might look up at his downturned face. Her fingers were tight on the back of his hand; the nail of her first finger scraped his knuckle.

“Tell me.”

It was Amidala who spoke, not Padmé. Her voice was clear, steadfast. Her gaze was equally so, and though she looked up at him, Anakin felt as if he were on his knees before her, a boy gazing up at the queen of Naboo, rather than a man sitting beside his wife. Padmé’s hand was smooth but for the modest calluses on the tips of her fingers, the badges earned in her own work. Her grip firmed.

“Tell me what Master Altis said to you,” she said.

Anakin lowered his eyes. With the gloved fingers of his right hand, he stroked her naked wrist. He did it very lightly. The leather of the glove was well-aged, soft.

“He agreed with my suspicions,” Anakin said to her bending wrist. He passed his thumb along the inside of her wrist, over the spot where her pulse beat. “Your midichlorian count is rising, because of the baby. You should train. Meditate. Try to learn how to quiet it if you can’t control it.”

“Ahsoka’s been showing me a few things,” Padmé said. She was mustering humor. “I think I’ve almost got the hang of pretending I don’t have a thousand other things to do.”

Padmé teased to soften blows, to cover up holes. He didn’t have to push to sense the fear fluttering at the edges or the core of acceptance within it all. He held her hand as he had so very many times before; their thighs fitted together as they always fit; the line of her nose hadn’t changed. He had never known her so completely, or as near to completeness, as he did then, when Padmé glimmered all about him in the force; all about, and under his skin.

Anakin closed his right hand over the back of her hand. Between both his hands, he held her. Her fingers were chilled. She clutched his hand in return. The line of her thumb, braced and crossed against the outside of his hand, was the second stroke of the X. His gloved fingers framed her wrist. The black leather was stark against her skin, even with the honey undertone of her coloring. The breadth of his palms dwarfed her. Very long ago, Padmé had held his hand between her hands, as he held her hand now, in the cabin of the ship that took him from Tatooine; the japor snippet was caught between their palms. He’d rested his head on her shoulder, and she’d rested her head on top of his. He hadn’t missed his mother any less, but Padmé had been there, sharing the red coat like a blanket with him, so at least he hadn’t been so cold or so alone.

Her curls fell; she’d bowed her head. Their foreheads brushed, just slightly at the top. The scent of her hair perfume tickled. She breathed in, and he breathed with her; their rhythm synced. Anakin ran his thumb up the side of her wrist.

“I should be the one teaching you,” he said.

She laid her left hand over the back of his gloved one. The clear polish on her fingernails shone, glossy. Her eyelashes rose; he felt the fine, fragile weight lifting as though his lashes lifted off his cheeks. He exhaled sharply through his nose. The connection snapped. He was in his own head again. 

“Ahsoka is doing very well,” Padmé said. She hadn’t noticed. “Though I don’t have much experience with any of this. I do feel calmer. It helps, just to have something to do about this.”

Her thumb was on its side along the back of his hand. The white nail was at odds with the leather, black. Her fingers were crooked, the tips pressed down, so to keep him there. She still meant to go to Naboo. No matter what he said to her or what anyone might ask of her, she would go. 

He said, forcefully, “I _want_ to be the one teaching you.”

The hand on top of his withdrew. He would not release her other hand. Anakin reached to hold her elbow in his right hand. She moisturized in the morning and the evening; he’d watched her rub lotion into her elbows and her wrists as she read the morning’s messages or the schedule for the next day. The skin there at her elbow was smooth, like her hands. He had a little scar on one knuckle, a spot he’d picked at as a child because his skin had cracked from the dry air; it itched, and he wanted it to stop itching.

She brushed some loose strands of hair behind his ear. “You know that isn’t feasible.”

“If I were to ask the Council for time—”

“You’d hate it,” Padmé said, smiling, “nothing to do but sit around all day. You’d terrorize poor Threepio. And I can’t ask for time off from the senate.”

“You’re going to anyway,” he said. “When you leave.”

Her eyes flicked skyward. “A recusal isn’t the same thing as a vacation.”

He rubbed the inside of her elbow with his thumb. The thin fabric of her sleeve engulfed his fingers. The crease at the inside of her elbow would be warm and very slightly damp; she’d perspired, her arms bent as she worked on the datapad. It was such a mundane thing, common to all humans and any number of other species. She was human. She lived. He had slipped into her head a moment before. Now she sat back, and all he had was her hand in his and his fingers up her sleeve and a phantom sensation of her fingernails at his temple, sweeping hair back from his brow to tuck behind his ear.

His hand tightened around her elbow. Consciously he eased his grip. He would have let go entirely but he found he was still too weak to do so. He wanted the feel of her skin, but the microscopic sensors embedded in his false hand registered pressure, weight, the physical form and not the details. He touched her; he did not feel her.

“Do you want me to leave?” he asked her. It came out flatly. 

Padmé’s gaze snapped back to him. If he reached out, not with his hands but with the part of him that dwelled always in the force, he could feel her; he could _know_ how she felt. He pulled his shields closer. The distance between them in the force widened. 

“Anakin,” she said, “no,” and her hand grasped his elbow so that they were like a circuit sealed within itself, his left hand and her right hand still clasped together between them. Her heart was beating in her wrist, light against his thumb.

He glanced down to their hands, joined. He could not bear the darkness of her eyes.

“Sometimes,” he said, jerkily, “I feel as if—I’m the only one fighting for _us_ —” He couldn’t have said it, looking at her eyes.

Her hand tightened, painfully so. Her thumb nail bit at his hand. He would not look up.

“I love you,” Padmé said, with throbbing intensity. “Anakin, I have given up my future for you. Don’t you ever think you’re the only one struggling with this. That you’re the only one who’s had to make sacrifices—”

“And is that what we are to you?” He did look up then, unable to spare her any more of it. “A sacrifice?”

She let go of him; his hand, his arm. His skin was cold; the chill washed over him. Then Padmé had caught his face in her hands, one hand at his jaw, the other on his cheek. She held him there, so that he could not turn from her again.

“I am _protecting_ us,” she said. “I’m fighting for us every day. And yes, there are sacrifices, Anakin, of course there are sacrifices, but I would rather—” Swallowing, she worked her lip between her teeth. Her gaze dropped. That spray of curls dipped. The sunlight gilded her dark curls.

He thought: Could I live without her?

“I would rather live like this,” she said, and her fingers drifted slowly across his cheek, a lingering stroke that made all the bones in his face ache for that awful, lonely tenderness, “than live without you. Even if we have to spend months apart from each other. Even if we have to hide— Even like that.”

He leaned into her hands, then the curve of her shoulders. His hair fell across his face, hiding his eyes. Whether he could live without her or not, he didn’t care to find out. Perhaps he lacked foresight, as Obi-Wan claimed; perhaps he allowed his impulses to override reason. Her hands slipped behind his head to cradle his nape. Her fingers laced in his hair. She smelled of her morning shower, her skin sweet for it. Her breasts rose as she breathed in; they fell as she exhaled. He closed his eyes and turned his cheek, to rest it on her collar.

“You’ll be safe on Naboo?”

Padmé smoothed his hair down the back of his head, her hand warm, steady. She did it again, petting him.

“Yes,” she said. “Ahsoka’s coming with me. I made her the offer last week, to join my guard.”

Anakin nodded under her hand. “Good. She can be reckless at times, but she has a good head, and her instincts are excellent. And she’s loyal,” he said, “more personally loyal than a Jedi should be.”

“She isn’t a Jedi,” Padmé reminded him.

He breathed out. “She’ll keep you safe.”

“I know she is,” Padmé said. “That’s why I’m giving her the job.” The fingers carding through his hair curled, so her nails scratched at his scalp. “She had a good teacher. If an unconventional one.”

Anakin smiled against the line of her clavicle, and he knew she felt it: her nails passed over his scalp again, a fraction sharper. He wished she’d do it again. He wished he could put it away, what he had to tell her, and lower her down on the settee and hang there over her, mindful as he kissed her of her belly between them. He wanted to cup in his hands her breasts and bend to kiss the ample swell of each, pushed up as they were by her gown. He settled for brushing his fingers over her belly, hidden by the outward fall of her gown. 

“I won’t go with you,” he said. “To Naboo. They’ve given me orders. I don’t know how long it will take.”

She traced his ear. “Can you tell me anything about it?”

“No,” Anakin said. 

She understood. The hand at his nape tensed. She understood, as he had understood when Obi-Wan would not discuss it, the target; the last of the Separatist movement’s original commanders and the only remaining commander with any real power over their crumbling army: General Grievous.

*

The message, a day old, came in as soon as he dropped from hyperspace, just outside Coruscant’s orbit: the Council requested his presence. If he hadn’t spoken with Obi-Wan shortly before his self-appointed mission, Anakin might have allowed himself the fantasy that the Council had at last determined he should be granted the title of Master. Anakin keyed in an acknowledgement and took the Delta-7 back to the rental agency. At the temple he showered quickly—as quickly as he could with his head spinning from the long and empty sleep of the trance. Anakin changed clothes before heading to the council chambers. Each footstep rang in his head, another brick placed as he walled Padmé off from his thoughts. He would go to her first, after this.

Rarely had he received orders from the gathered Council over the course of the war. Now that the galaxy was settling uneasily into something again resembling peace, the Jedi had returned to the old formalities. The ranks of knight and master once more held greater meaning than that of general. On the battlefield he had been Mace Windu’s equal, his rank indistinguishable from that of Shaak Ti. In the grand council room, he knelt at the center of their half-ring with his hands flat before him, one on each thigh. He wore brown robes over plain tunic and trousers, as they wore brown robes over plain tunic and trousers. He was a knight. They were masters.

Rising from his bow, his head aching, Anakin glanced to the side. A seat at the end was empty. Others were absent, Masters Ki-Adi-Mundi and Plo Koon’s chairs empty, a consequence of the lateness of his response to the Council’s summons. It was the one seat that mattered. He settled back on his knees again.

“Where is Master Kenobi?”

Grand Master Yoda’s ear twitched. Delicately, a hand at his mouth, he coughed. The sunlight filtered through the fine, wispy hairs at his crown, wrinkled. On Yoda’s right, Windu leaned forward, his elbows propped on the sloping arms of his chair. His hands hung loosely from the ends.

“The Council has summoned you, Skywalker,” said Windu, “not Master Kenobi.”

Anakin lowered his eyes to the polished stone floor and the star mosaic placed into it, a motif executed with tiny flat stones shades lighter or darker than the base-work. His sleeves pooled on the stones, masking decorative fletches in the corona of a dying star. This was not a war room, or the bridge of a star ship under his command.

He said, “I apologize for my outburst.”

A light rap caught Anakin: Yoda had tapped his cane on the floor. Together, the masters looked to their master. He folded his wizened hands together on the crooked tongue of his cane.

“Deception leads to the dark side,” Yoda mused. “Sorry, you are not.”

His fingers tightened on his thighs, wrinkling the thick, coarse folds of his robes. Yoda did not permit him the luxury of making an excuse. His thin, reed-like voice echoed in the chamber with its high, rounded roof and wide windows, so that even as he rasped, his words carried clearly. 

“Master Kenobi, yes, absent he is today,” said Yoda thoughtfully, in that way he had of poking at one, “on a mission for the Republic, a very important mission. Most important, you might say.”

Fixedly Anakin stared at the little yellow stones that outlined the spitting edges of the corona. Master Windu’s heavy hand was easier to bear than the flitting blows Yoda dealt, for Windu was impartial and Yoda was, hidden under the sarcasm itself hidden under his solicitousness, kind. Somehow the kindness sharpened the edges of his tongue.

“You must excuse Master Kenobi for his absence, Sir Skywalker,” said Yoda, “for he is hunting General Grievous.”

The constellations scattered around his knees clarified. A small white hair had stuck in the shallow crevice between the thicker base stone and a decorative tile, scuffed from years of wear, worn at the edge. The temple was old, the mosaic nearly as. The sunlight that illuminated dust motes in this revered chamber was ancient. The Jedi had existed long before Anakin.

His head snapped up. His attention narrowed. The moment’s chastisement was forgotten. He was, again, outraged: overlooked, sidelined; diminished by the Council of masters. They would have barred him, as a child, from the order entirely, if Obi-Wan had let them. Where was Obi-Wan now? Off, to end the war for the Jedi.

“Alone?” he demanded. The _without me_ , he swallowed. 

“Skywalker,” said Windu, warningly. “You forget yourself. Do not speak out of turn again.”

Yoda’s wizened brow had lifted. “No, Master Windu,” he said. His hand, palm up, little fingers curled at the ends, he lifted to Anakin. “Let him speak, we shall.”

He heard the rebuke in that. Anakin set his teeth against it. Calm: that was what the masters respected; reason. He tightened the anger in his chest, so that it was an unrefined point and not a cloud hanging over him. His eyes dropped to the foot of Grand Master Yoda’s chair. He’d done it too swiftly. The world tipped a slight inch and then righted.

“Masters,” he said, constrained. “I apologize for speaking.” A lie, as Yoda had said. Anakin thought it prudent. All the Council wanted was the show of humility. He went on, staring at the space between Yoda’s feet and the floor. “Master Kenobi cannot apprehend General Grievous alone. He’s a skilled warrior. The lightsabers he’s taken are proof.”

“Ahsoka Tano survived him,” said Master Shaak Ti, on Yoda’s left. The pale blue masking around her eyes highlighted the darkness of them. She looked unblinkingly at Anakin.

“Ahsoka was strong,” Anakin fired, quicker than thought, “stronger than most Jedi I’ve known. She survived Grievous twice—held him off, on her own—as a padawan. No one else _could_ do that.” He’d seen in Shaak Ti’s face, like to Ahsoka by virtue of their shared species but so vastly unlike Ahsoka, an unspoken judgment. Ahsoka Tano was not even a Jedi. Both of Shaak Ti’s students had died, he thought. Ahsoka lived.

Yoda tapped a fingernail against his cane. The tiny, clear click disrupted Anakin. Too late he saw the trap, intentionally laid or not, he’d fallen into: pride; the attachment. Master Shaak Ti leaned back in her chair. Her eyes were as dark as ever and as still.

Master Windu spoke plainly, as was his fashion. “With respect to your training and her strengths, Ahsoka was a padawan when she faced General Grievous. Obi-Wan Kenobi is a fully trained master. He’s proven himself capable time and again.” He took on a stern tone, emphasized by the way he gestured at Anakin. “Why is it that you feel Master Kenobi is not up for the task the Council has given him?”

As he had separated Padmé from his conscious mind, Anakin closed off the thing building inside him. The swell receded; he crushed it.

He said, exactingly, “I _believe_ that history shows it would be a mistake to underestimate General Grievous. Stealth will not work. Strength is needed to capture Grievous. If I were to accompany Master Kenobi, our chances will be greatly improved.” He raised his hand, opened. “Send me as well. I can rendezvous with Master Kenobi, and together we can track Grievous down.” His fingers closed; he fisted his hand, demonstrating.

Masters Windu and Yoda shared a glance. Shaak Ti, alone of the three elder masters present, continued to watch Anakin. She was smiling, faintly. What the other masters present thought of his display, he did not care. Kenobi’s emptied chair sat apart, an insult. Yoda hummed. His fingers were tapping at the cane.

“Of an accord, we are,” he said. “You will rendezvous with Master Obi-Wan.”

Again, Anakin had been cut short. Shaak Ti’s smile widened, just a wicked crook at the corner. Her eyes were black and penetrating. When she turned her head her montrals, far taller and far sharper than Ahsoka’s blunt, youthful horns, cast a new and darker shadow across the floor, at a long angle that tapered. Obi-Wan had once called her cunning; she was shark-like.

“Master Kenobi made a similar argument to the Council,” she said. “Do not be so quick to judge him. He remains your greatest proponent.”

Anakin turned on the Council, all of them. “Then why—” He cut himself short.

Master Windu answered the question. “Not all of the masters agreed with Obi-Wan.” He was blunt, not cruel; objective, not passive. “The decision to send you on this mission was not unanimous.”

Lowly, his teeth aching, Anakin said, “Why tell me this now?”

Again, Windu answered. He did so with something nearly like compassion.

“You deserve transparency.” 

Anakin stared at him. Master Windu, he knew, had spoken out against his admission to the order; he knew, too, that Windu had maintained his reservations regarding Anakin’s appointment to the rank of Jedi Knight after the trials. Windu had never strived to hide or minimize his stance. He was too much the Jedi for such niceties.

“Over the course of the war, you have proved yourself as capable as Obi-Wan,” Windu said. “But the war is also why the Council questioned Master Kenobi’s belief that you should be assigned this mission. You’ve neglected your spiritual wellbeing to pursue the mandates of war.”

“I did what the Republic needed of me,” Anakin protested. “The Jedi teach that the needs of the self are surpassed by the needs of others. I have fulfilled every order I was given, without error, just as I will fulfill this one.”

“Discuss this at a later time, we will,” said Yoda, before Windu might rebut Anakin. He looked down on Anakin, and softly Yoda sighed. His small shoulders, though, they did not sink but remained as they were, steady, gently bent. “Much the galaxy asks of you. Much it asks all of us. When the war is over, time we will all have to heal.”

Anakin dropped his gaze. To the masters, this would be a show of respect. He had been gripped with the fear that they knew, somehow, that he was haunted by nightmares of his mother; the screams of the sand people that night in the desert; the smoke and acrid stink of blaster fire; the rasp of his own voice as he called for heavier fire. He wanted to argue it, to set up a defense before he was attacked; but they had not accused him of this weakness.

“Master Windu will brief you,” said Grand Master Yoda. “Prepare you. Faith in you—the Council places this.”

He bowed his head, low. “I submit to the Council’s judgment,” he said. The coarse cloth of his outer robe scratched his cheek, but the stone floor was cool on his brow. He made the motions of humility, and the masters dismissed him. 

Anakin left them, thinking of how little he liked the robes and how poorly he wore them, and how comfortable Master Kenobi always looked in such dress; then, as he shucked the brown robe in the lift, he dismissed it, all of it, the lingering fear from the council chamber, the sour bite of knowing once again the Council had declined to consider him for mastery, Obi-Wan vouching for him; everything. He’d the mission. The mission, he thought as the lift doors opened; and Padmé, he thought as he made for the temple’s vast hangar. His stride lengthened; his pace quickened. The Council was far from him now, farther removed with every step. He was going to her; he was returning to Padmé at last, at last.

*

He remained there on the settee with Padmé, his head tucked against her and turned from the light coming through the windows. Padmé relaxed her touch, so that the hand on his nape was gentle. She began again, with her other hand, to card her fingers through his hair. The nails passed ghostlike across his scalp. Her chest rose and then fell, a motion echoed in her shoulders. He did not hear her heart as it beat but rather, he watched the pulse point in her throat. If he should close his eyes and stretch out to her, to feel for her in the force, how easily might he slip inside her, the barrier of their separate consciousnesses no more—

He had felt her so thoroughly before that the little hitch of breath in her throat had caught in his throat; his heart had beat with her heart; the stiff wires woven into her brassiere, so as to hold her breasts so high, had restricted his ribs. Her pulse worked, beating in the small hollow of her throat. He would not want to leave her again. He did not want to leave her again. Anakin lifted his head from her shoulder. His hair, grown too long, was dark against her breasts, and then this too lifted from her. He reached up and ran the back of a finger—the first finger of his left hand—across the swell of her left breast, as if to brush a fallen hair from her skin. The touch was too brief to catch her heartbeat with his knuckle.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone,” Anakin said. He looked to her throat. Her face would be too much; her dark, brown eyes. “It might be months.”

Padmé sat, thinking. Then she reached not for his hand, but the datapad on the table. Her long, glimmering earrings swung. A bit of light flashed off the rounded stone set in the earring’s low belly; it stung his eyes. Already she was far from him.

“Chancellor Glil intends to introduce new legislation,” she said, “legislation I intend to fight. And of course the election is approaching, so there’s much I have to do to prepare the Senate for that.”

“I still say that you’d make an ideal vice-chair,” he said, trying for lightness.

Padmé smiled, at least, and looked at him again finally. She had accepted it, his leaving; he saw this. For the good of the Republic: that was what she’d say; that was what she always said. She was right. He agreed with her on it. Grievous was a monster, cruel, murderous; he’d nearly killed Ahsoka twice, and he’d slain so many young Jedi, students Ahsoka had known by name. He’d killed children, and for what noble cause? For glory; for their sabers. It was Anakin’s duty to see Grievous brought to justice for his crimes. 

Padmé’s earrings shone, too bright at this angle. He’d a dizzying memory, of a Tusken child, bleeding and burnt, falling to the sand as the first of Tatooine’s suns began quietly and unkindly to look up from the horizon. Anakin’s gut tightened. That lurching sensation intensified.

“Well, I’m not going to run for vice-chair,” Padmé was saying, and she too strove for gaiety, “but I can still help Bail with his campaign.” 

Her earrings swung again: she dipped her head, looking to the datapad’s screen. He focused on her, to the exclusion of all else. Padmé: only Padmé. Slowly his vision cleared. Her fingers swept deliberately across the datapad. Her thumb arched away from it. He calmed, tracing the curve of her thumb, the slope of the pad, the fold of skin at the base that connected it to her palm.

She scrolled through a schedule and said, very casually, “With everything there is to do, I can’t see how I’ll be able to leave for Naboo before the summer.”

He looked at her, Padmé who was raising her eyes to meet his gaze. That was a month later than she’d first said, perhaps even two months later. She’d be at the end of the second trimester or the start of the third. He had thought she would be gone when he returned, though Naboo was not so terribly far from Coruscant and she might still go without him if the mission should drag on. She would go in the end, with Anakin; without him. 

The sun was in her hair. The sun was on her face. The little mole near her mouth was in a thin shadow, cast by her nose as it broke the light coming in through the window. A smile was at the corners of her lips. Her eyelashes were thick and black; they looked like smoke from burning coal. He could smell her, the perfume she always wore; her skin beneath that. In her throat, her heart was beating. His own heart was a swollen, ugly thing stuck in his chest. He had in his head a memory as of something from a dream, of Padmé fighting to breathe and failing as the fine bones in her neck also failed. 

Another thought replaced this, a clearer one. He knew it as a personality certainty and not a vision of things to come or that might have come: if anyone were ever to try to hurt her, he would rip them apart; he would burn them; he’d see that smoke rising. He’d done it before. If pressed, he would do it again. He waited for guilt to come, or shame. He felt neither; only the nearness of her. Did General Grievous feel shame? He found that didn’t matter to him. What Anakin had done, he had done for just reasons; it was vengeance, a punishment dealt, not an act unprovoked. He believed this, shakily at first and then devoutly as he thought it again. He was right; he was just. 

“I won’t stay any longer than that,” Padmé said. She gestured to her belly, masked by the carefully arranged drape of her gown, a gown cut like robes. “Jar-Jar’s already said how strange it is to see me in such frumpy clothes.”

“Nothing would look frumpy on you,” he said, thinking it romantic; but Padmé laughed, the little one that was more in the lidding of her eyes and the one tremor that jumped her chest.

He reached to touch her cheek with his right hand. She was leaving, he thought again. He would set it all on fire for her; and Padmé would pack everything she had and everything she was, here on Coruscant, to protect his standing with the Jedi. His metal hand was insensate. He could not feel her skin, not through the glove of course, but even had his hand been bare he would felt nothing, only the shape of her cheek and the line of bone beneath the skin and thin layer of fat growing slowly, slowly thicker as her pregnancy progressed. He had thought she was running; he wanted to ask her to stay, to fight it. 

She wasn’t running. He struggled with the idea. That they should either of them be expected to sacrifice, more even than they already had sacrificed— It stuck in his throat, like a fish bone.

Anakin smoothed his thumb along her cheek. Her skin was beyond his touch, but he could feel the little pleasure in her, as it seeped out into the force. He ought to strengthen his mind against it, to push away this distraction as he had learned to do so with so many others. Instead he allowed her entrance.

“When I return,” he said, “I will come to you. Wherever you are.”

Padmé said, “I don’t want you to have to give up anything,” and clasped his wrist in her hand, as though to pull his fingers from their exploration of her jaw. He let her draw his hand down to her lap. She stared steadily at him.

“There are things more important than us.”

Nothing was more important than Padmé, he wanted to say; but he was tired of the fighting. He felt so much like the child beside her sometimes, so full of passion and fury, and there she was, very cool, very calm, planning always for the future. He wanted it all changed now; she was preparing to change it over time.

He leaned forward and kissed her softly, asking nothing. When he’d done, he rested his forehead against hers. Her eyes were open; she watched him. She saw everything. She always did.

“Wherever you are,” he promised.

She breathed out, a long, worn gust of air that tickled his nose. Her lips compressed. Then, infinitesimally, she nodded.

“I love you,” Anakin said to her. He cupped her jaw in his hands.

Her eyes were dark, fathomless. Sad, in a way. He could chase the sadness from her, he thought. He knew that he could do this.

“I know,” Padmé said.


End file.
